Kathunter's Personal Space

I promise I am as tired of this story as you are, but I feel like I should add this to the archives, Take Two bought the rights to MLB and also the ESPN developer, Visual Concepts.
So I spent some time this weekend talking about this whole deal with someone who informed me that ESPN's market share last year grew from 5% to 11% (drunk estimations). God forbid someone else make a good sports game. So now the teams have been picked and Sega's left foot is gone, and the dodge-ball game is between Take Two and EA. How any of them will make a profit on the actual titles in question is hard to imagine. How the competition elimination will add to the said publisher's bottom line will be one of the top stories of 2005.

"Earlier, we reported that publishing giant Take-Two had signed a deal with Major League Baseball for exclusive rights to make baseball games with the real names of players and official teams. According to San Francisco Business Times, the second phase of the company's wheeling and dealing has fallen into place. After buying out Microsoft's sports concerns late last year, the company has moved on to purchase Visual Concepts--Sega's development arm for their line of sports games.

Last year's ESPN 2K5, a mainstay for Visual Concepts and a direct competitor for Electronic Arts' Madden series, was co-published by Sega and GlobalStar, a Take-Two games brand, at a budget price. Part of the publishing agreement was reputed to give Take-Two the option to purchase Visual Concepts from Sega, and now the company has apparently exercised that option for a cool $24 million."

[via: 1UP.COM]