Friday Starter is a weekly column of news and tidbits from the world of baseball video games—past and present, domestic and foreign.
Umamusume Pretty Derby is an anime media franchise about famous real-world racehorses who are reincarnated as girl pop idols. They race each other and also dance and sing and have relationship drama. I haven’t seen the show.
A gacha game for Steam and mobile devices has existed in Japan for years, but came out in English a few weeks ago. To everyone’s surprise, it’s been a huge viral hit. Somehow, a horse racing management game has become massively popular.
After watching some streams of the game, my first reaction was: Mechanically, Umamusume Pretty Derby is almost identical to the signature Success Mode in Power Pros, Konami’s baseball video game series. The overall game flow is very similar:
1: You start a career as a new character, either running the debut race as a new horse or starting a high school/college/pro baseball career.
2: You choose one of five different options for training your skills, or you choose to rest. Your character’s energy level determines a percentage chance that the training will fail. A varying selection of teammates/helpers are slotted to different training options, making that training more powerful.
3: In-between training, you get short visual novel-like scenes with your helper characters/teammates/rivals giving snippets of story and simple choices with different effects.
4: Then after about a month of training, you get a race/baseball game. Better results will get you better effects to level up your skills, and in some cases losing will prematurely end your run.
Then a friend online reminded me, Konami actually sued Cygames two years ago for just that reason (JP link).
Online sleuths initially assumed the patent at the heart of the lawsuit would be No. 5814300. Later lawsuit records show the specific patent under discussion was a very similar one, 5894331,B.
The officially machine translated legalese for the second patent looks like this:
The description of both patents are a bit endless, but basically, this is a system familiar to anyone who has played a Pawapuro game from the past fifteen years or has played the new Umamusume game. When starting a new run of the game, you select certain helper characters from the series to join you. Based on the character or combination of characters you select, you will see different events in game. Those characters can have varied effects on your main character and on each other, making for a sort of roguelite that lets players strategize the ideal build.
Both patents cite the strategy guide for Jikkyou Powerful Pro Yakyuu 2012 as proof of the invention.
There is chatter around the internet that the patent is expired, so the lawsuit is immediately frivolous. While I’m not a lawyer, I see nothing on the Japanese patent site linked above about either patent being expired. And the standard patent term for Japan seems to be 20 years after the filing date, which would make this valid until 2033.
Konami’s legal department is infamously combative, and they’re likely the reason you can’t play NPB teams in Out of the Park Baseball anymore.
As of March, Cygames had filed a countersuit to invalidate Konami’s patent, according to this Japanese tweet. It’s unclear to me what result if any came out of that hearing, and all recent mentions of the lawsuit on Japanese social media are just wondering what ever happened about this lawsuit.
Regardless of how the lawsuits turn out… If you were Konami, wouldn’t you see the success of Umamusume as more reason to localize Power Pros again? The main response I’ve seen to Umamusume is “I can’t believe I’m actually enjoying this.” People who have no interest in horse racing and might even be hostile to an anime girl gacha game are digging the Success Mode mechanics. If Americans will play a horseracing management game… Surely they’d play a baseball game too?
A new Jon Dowd
As discussed last week, Backyard Baseball ’01 was unable to license Barry Bonds to appear in its rerelease of the first MLB-licensed Backyard Baseball game. So they had to give him a new name. Here it is:
Most importantly, the world has a new "Jon Dowd". Barry Bonds could not be licensed to appear in the gamer, so he is replaced by a new kid named Hugo Hernandez with the same stats, handedness, and birthday.
— 30-30 Club – Baseball Video Games Encyclopedia (@30-30.club) July 8, 2025 at 9:44 AM
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Hugo Hernandez is the fictional character replacing Barry Bonds. He’s a pretty generic new kid with the same attributes Bonds had in the original game. Frank Thomas and Ken Griffey Jr. also had to be replaced:
Ken Griffey Jr. and Frank Thomas are the other two players who were not licensed to appear in the rerelease. They also get new generic replacements with the same attributes: Luke Lopez for Griffey Chase Wilton for Thomas
— 30-30 Club – Baseball Video Games Encyclopedia (@30-30.club) July 8, 2025 at 9:46 AM
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For that matter, two team logos were also replaced in the release. The Cleveland Indians are replaced everywhere in-game by the Cleveland Guardians, and the Oakland A’s become just… the A’s.
Most of the logos from the original release are preserved, but there are a few exceptions. From this splash screen showing each team logo in the intro, you can see the Cleveland Indians logo is replaced by the Guardians. More regrettably, Oakland A's are now just A's.
— 30-30 Club – Baseball Video Games Encyclopedia (@30-30.club) July 8, 2025 at 9:31 AM
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Backyard Baseball ’01 launch difficulties
Speaking of which, the new rerelease hasn’t gone smoothly so far. While the game is #1 on the iOS paid game charts (which are otherwise full of big-name games released years ago):
The Google Play Store version of the game still isn’t live yet. It’s not clear exactly what the hold-up is, but Bitball faced the same problems, not being able to push their game live when they wanted to.
Worse, some players (including myself) are seeing frequent crashes on the Steam version of the game. Initial patches weren’t enough to make the problem go away, at least not for me. I’ll record gameplay as soon as I’m able to get through a full six innings.
This is much more minor, but the intro cinematic also needed a day one patch. I recorded the intro on the pre-patch version, then rechecked after the patch notes mentioned changing the cinematic. It looks like the only change was adding a logo for the publisher, Playground Productions, which wasn’t in there originally. Small whoopsie.
Song of the Week
A simple, understated instrumental GameCube jam for you this week: the theme music for Mario Superstar Baseball: