From now on, I am referring to Konami and Upper Deck as "Konumbnuts" and "Upper Dorks".

[xaq_the_aereon]

Okay, so for the past few years Konumbnuts and Upper Dorks have had a distribution agreement over the "Yu-Gi-Oh!" trading card game. Last month, Konumbnuts decided to gank the agreement and distribute it themselves, giving the contract on it (which is valid until next year) the finger.

Upper Dorks took them to court over it and won, keeping the distribution rights for the US and Europe.

Konumbnuts responds to this by stopping all shipment of the product to Upper Dorks.

End result of this? Upper Dorks has no product to distribute, and due to the contract, Konumbnuts has no right to distribute it in Upper Dorks' turf...which leaves every TCG-playing duelist thoroughly screwed.


Just when I find a deck idea for the next set we would have gotten that I really liked and could have probably used to make a name in the YGO community for myself, too. Go figure.

/rant

Comments

[valkyreace.livejournal.com]

That sucks. So there will be no more "Yu-Gi-Oh!" tournaments? I hope you find something you can fill in the gap with. But at least the cards you have will be worth more, if you want to hold onto them for the monetary value later.

I also have a question:

How can we convince them to do the same with Pokemon?

[xaq.livejournal.com]

Pokemon already had their fun with this...Nintendo not only ganked the game back from whoever they were licensing it through (Hasbro, I think?), but took every card made up until that point and said "Yeah, we're not gonna let you use those at tournaments anymore."

*shrugs* Anyway, YGO's just gonna slow down a bit for now as far as tournaments in North America, Europe, and Australia go. Best case scenario, the situation gets resolved and things get back on track with minimal damage, regardless of who's doing the distributing. Worst case, it goes on until next year, when the distribution license responsible for all this fighting expires and ends the dispute once and for all...at which point Konumbnuts is gonna be hard pressed to get their customer base back.

Tournaments are still scheduled to go on on the high-end range, but until this whole mess is done with, I expect the game to slowly hemorrhage to nothingness outside of the area around Japan.