OOTP, Sega Going Separate Ways

[StlSluggers]

Not major news, but I know a few people here who have played this game in the past. I thought the series had dramatically improved under Sega, so it will be interesting to see what changes come when they go back to being on their own again.

Following on from the March release of OOTP Baseball 2007, Sports Interactive, the sports management development specialists and the German based OOTP Developments have announced that they are to go their separate ways, with immediate effect.

Link

[StlSluggers]

Pretty enlightening post in their forums:

The reason why we joined SI was to a) learn a lot and b) get the game into stores with proper MLB licensing. However, Take 2 then purchased the exclusive license, so b) could not work. What was left was the situation we had for years before, OOTP being sold purely online. So nothing much changed really, so we & SI figured in the end we'd be better off doing this ourselves again

Interesting that they thought having an MLBPA-licensed product would have boosted their sales. I've always felt that OOTP appealed to the data junkies out there, and those people have no problem waiting for the team/player data to be created by a user and posted for free on some website.

[bleach168]

Pretty enlightening post in their forums:

The reason why we joined SI was to a) learn a lot and b) get the game into stores with proper MLB licensing. However, Take 2 then purchased the exclusive license, so b) could not work. What was left was the situation we had for years before, OOTP being sold purely online. So nothing much changed really, so we & SI figured in the end we'd be better off doing this ourselves again

Interesting that they thought having an MLBPA-licensed product would have boosted their sales. I've always felt that OOTP appealed to the data junkies out there, and those people have no problem waiting for the team/player data to be created by a user and posted for free on some website.

I agree. I usually sim into the future and while it's nice to see what kind of numbers Vlad Guerrero would finish with, it's not that important since I end up playing with all fictional players anyways.

[bigh0rt]

Markus is one of the biggest scam artists ever. He'll never get another dime of mine, the putz.