There was a report in yesterday’s Tribune that caught my eye. Unfortunately it doesn’t seem to be on their website so I can’t link to it but it was a piece on the ongoing row between the GAA and the GBA about the image rights of the players, this time in relation to a new Playstation game by Sony. Now, I realise that there’s a whole lot more going on behind this, it’s just one more chapter in a big beef between these two groups but it just struck me as ridiculous.
According to the Tribune’s report the Gaelic Football players are up in arms because the game allows gamers to name the players on their make-believe teams whatever they want. So essentially they can play the All-Ireland final all over again with players of their choice or with players from whatever era or with whoever they want. The players are angry because they feel their image rights are not being protected in this. Hmm. Oookay. But fellas, your images aren’t being used. Your names may be but as I understand it this is just in the same way that any game provides the gamer with the ability to name the characters. So your name could be used but then again so could the entire cast of Coronation Streets’. There could be a Corrie v Crossroads playoff on some gamer’s console. Hey for all I know somebody could be using my name to play Halo with!! I feel so used!
Or maybe that’s it. I just have to wonder are they peeved because they’ve heard the stories about Tiger Woods or Ronaldo or Tony Hawks being paid big bucks to have their images used in the games that bear their names. If that’s the case then they’ve got their heads in the clouds. Ronaldo was involved in all aspects of his game from the cover to the promotion. An image of his face was used to texture the head of the ingame model. As for Tiger Woods, he was mo-capped (wore a ping-pong covered body suit that digitally tracked his movements) so that not only was his image used ingame, but so were his signature moves.
Perhaps this is what they’re getting at, maybe the players are hoping for some sweet deal that involves them in all the merchandising of this game and gives them a nice wad of cash. Well, I think they’re barking up the wrong tree by blaming the GAA for not securing this for them. Face it, a gaelic football game is never going to have the same global appeal as a Golf or Soccer game, no matter if it’s got Ryan McMenamin on the cover. I can’t even find a mention of it on amazon.co.uk. I would say that it was Sony who wasn’t interested in going to the hassle of putting the players’ faces on the ingame characters and they wouldn’t have been interested in shelling out big bucks to secure image rights when they can just go the easy route and leave it open to the gamer. It just wouldn’t make any difference to the bottom line. Those die-hard fans would still buy it and those who don’t know about Gaelic football won’t know who these guys are or care about the game.
Plus, with the developers being Australian I’d say they just tweaked their Aussie Rules game and regurgitated it to make it GAA.