Open letter from Upper Deck International

OPEN LETTER

Upper Deck Panoceanic C.V. and Upper Deck International B.V. (hereinafter called: “Upper Deck”) wish to broadcast the following press release.

Recently several media have reported that Konami Digital Entertainment B.V. and/or Konami Marketing Inc. and/or Konami Digital Entertainment Inc. and/or its worldwide affiliates (hereinafter called: “Konami”) is/are taking over all operational and business aspects of the Yu-Gi-Oh!TM TRADING CARD GAME with immediate effect, based on an alleged termination of the distribution agreements with Upper Deck. According to this report Konami will also take over distribution and customer support for the Yu-Gi-Oh! TRADING CARD GAME

Upper Deck wishes to point out with great emphasis that the aforementioned reports are false, there is no legal ground or justification for this termination by Konami whatsoever and that this termination is therefore wrongful. Regarding the Yu-Gi-Oh! TM TRADING CARD GAME business Upper Deck is still the sole and exclusive distributor for the European territory and will continue providing the Yu-Gi-Oh!TM TRADING CARD GAME products to all its contractual customers. Upper Deck has already sent a warning letter to Konami demanding that Konami ceases the broadcasting of this misleading and unlawful information and to rectify accordingly forthwith. If Konami does not voluntarily comply with said warning, Upper Deck shall take all necessary legal actions forthwith.

Based on the foregoing, Upper Deck will continue to conduct business with all its counterparties as usual.

Kind regards,
On behalf of Upper Deck



Eric Burzle
President
Upper Deck Panoceanic BV

Nico Blauw
CEO
Upper Deck International BV


Source: http://www.upperdeck-international.com/

 

[Maruno]

Interesting. Might this be the reason for the lawsuit mentioned in another thread? Of course it is - there's no way it couldn't be. Sounds like Konami aren't exactly behaving properly here. It should be interesting to see how this pans out.

Am I the only one who notices the letter only refers to Europe and not the USA? While I wouldn't be surprised that Konami doesn't care for Europe and decided they wanted control of the distribution rights only in the USA, I also think that I may just be misunderstanding something here.

So the question arises: will anything change at all? Konami says yes, Upper Deck says no.

 

[EmeraldDragon]

Well if konami takes over the US only then UDE can spare more money for us Euro peope and get us some more big events going.

 

[Maruno]

Well, hopefully. Not that I'll go to them, though - I'm not particularly interested in spending all my money on children's card games.

 

[kingpinopie]

What ?? why not Maruno? why wouldnt you want to spend all of your hard earned money on a game? I mean come on, this game is the basis of all of our lives and we should all follow it religiously like a cult....
Im just playing...

Just wanted to say hello.... its been a long time!

Thats insane tho... seems this has been waiting to come to a head between them for a long time though. I wonder if it's actually true... afterall I have been out of touch for .. well ... a long long time >.. Do you think it would be better if Konami just takes it over?? I would think that would hurt sales quite a bit... but then again taking out the middle man may help, you never know.....

 

[Maruno]

The point to remember is that the middle-man here (UDE) actually do good things for the game. If they disappear, we have to deal with Konami.

One such example is that Konami translates the card effects to sound nice, whereas UDE wants the cards to say what they actually do.