EA has gotten into a bit of trouble in Germany with their FIFA 2002 World Cup title. It appears that a German court has ruled the title must be pulled from shelves since the German goalkeeper Oliver Kahn has not been compensated for use of his name and likeness.
A decision on compensation for Kahn will now follow, and may cost Electronic Arts millions of euro.
I know this seems boring when compared to discussions on video-game design, but from a legal standpoint, this will change the way sports games (specifically Soccer titles) are made.
American sports titles are easy to make by comparison to Soccer titles, since American sports franchises have players associations which encompass the licensing rights for the names and likenesses of the players. All one has to do is pay the flat rate to say, the NFL Player's Association, and one has the rights to the name and likeness of every player in the NFL. (For a time, the only exception to this rule was Jordan during his run with the Bulls in the NBA. He was the only player not in the NBA Player Association, because he wanted more money than the NBA PA flat rate, and as it turns out, he is conspicuously known as "Player" in the majority of the NBA titles from that era).
But with a sport like Soccer, there is no single definable player association, and so it becomes much, much harder to attain the legal name and likeness rights to all of the players. Even if you get FIFPRO, it doesn't mean you're going to have all of the club players (since FIFPRO is for the National teams). In the past, companies have gone so far as to slightly alter the name of the player (Kahn would be Khan, for instance) and get the likeness close but definitely off, or just hopefully use that player without paying for the likeness, which EA evidently just tried to do.
"For the first time we have an answer to the crucial question - can one represent personalities in videogames without their consent? Now the legal situation is clear," lawyer Matthias Prinz told CNN.de(translated from German).
As far as the cover athletes goes, I'm not sure about cross-promotional deals.
For one thing, having a Baseball player promote a Football game wouldn't jive with the sports-gamers very well. Also, I know we run into issues where we can make a single commercial for all of our sports titles, but I'm pretty sure we're not allowed to show another sports title poster in the background of another game. For instance, if we're shooting video for a Baseball title and there's a kiosk in the background for a Hockey title, we have to blur out the Hockey kiosk. I could be wrong on this, but I'm pretty sure that's company policy, and I think it has something to do with the pro sports affiliations not wanting to be associated with each other. It's all *very* confusing.
Posted by: Bowler | 04/29/2003 at 08:43 PM
Bah. Stupid lousy Error 500. Please delete this post.
Posted by: Bowler | 04/29/2003 at 08:43 PM
It's pretty miserable how this ruins attempts by games publishers to make football (soccer) games as realistic as possible. However, the system was already pretty bad, allowing only one publisher (EA, who have a deal with FIFA) to use player likenesses.
It could be argued that the use of real player names and likenesses is what keeps people buying FIFA above other football games considered to be better by critics (ISS).
Posted by: Stuart Dennett | 04/30/2003 at 09:48 AM