Unlicensed Japanese league patched out of Out of the Park Baseball 23
Really rough news for OOTP fans as the Japanese league, Nippon Professional Baseball, is being removed via patch.
Initially, indications were that existing savegames could continue to use the league but any new games would not include the league. However, a follow-up patch on January 17th randomizes NPB data in games with multiple leagues, and totally blocks loading a save that uses only the NPB.
Really a brutal change. Anyone who purchased the game partly or wholly due to it including the Japanese league is suddenly out in the cold. The NPB was never officially licensed for inclusion in the game series, to my understanding; Mods were necessary to get team logos or player likenesses for NPB.
Baseball management games like Baseball Mogul and Out of the Park Baseball have long lived in a legal gray area, using real player names without any logos or likenesses in a fair use situation similar to fantasy baseball. OOTP is now fully licensed with Major League Baseball and the Korean Baseball Organization, so it includes logos and player likenesses for only those teams and not those of any other of the many leagues in the game. But the series went years without these licenses, apparently never being challenged on including real player names until now.
Even if you only play MLB, suddenly losing the ability to sign exciting real players like Roki Sasaki in the future really hurts the realism. Part of the appeal of OOTP is that it contains the whole baseball world and you’ll hardly see any fictional player names even deep into the future.
Older OOTP games will presumably still include the league since they aren’t being actively sold on online storefronts (even OOTP 22 is nowhere to be found legally, a separate issue I’m not a fan of). In an ecosystem where the game is sold only on Steam, and Steam forces automatic patches, and no old versions of the game can be found for sale, it’s a major blow for both this series and for video game preservation.
My own version of a weirdly retro Nintendo tweet
Some GIFs of the scoreboard from Ultra Baseball Jitsumeiban
