Konami is being sued on the grounds of misrepresentation and fraud after publisher kept the revenue of their game to themselves instead of paying back the bank.
For those readers who do not know, Def Jam Rapstar, is a game which pits two of the rap and hip-hop world’s biggest icons against each other in battle and no, it’s not rap battles that the reader should be picturing but rather more along the lines of Mortal
Kombat, Tekken and Street Fighter.
The game proved immensely popular in its early iterations before the novelty began wearing off and the title lost some of its street ‘cred’. However, it turns out that the game has become the centre piece in a scandal, which has seen its publisher, Konami,
draw down nearly $14-million of their $15-million line of credit from City National Bank.
Basically Konami assured the bank that the game would sell around 2.5-million copies in its first year, which the bank now terms as “baseless and unrealistic”. A statement from the bank itself elaborated on the many ways that they had been ‘done over’ by
Konami.
It read: “CNB has recently learned that defendants’ representations concerning financial conditions and repayment of the loan – both before and after the loan was approved – were false at the time they were made and that defendants never had any intention
of repaying the loan as promised.”
That was not all, it also turns out that “rather than paying game-related proceeds directly to CNB as agreed” Konami “kept all game-related proceeds for themselves.” Adding insult to injury is the fact that the publisher has also refused to remit any of
the revenue to CNB.
It gets even more interesting as CNB claim that Konami “still have not paid CNB a single penny of the principal amount that is due.” The bank also claims that Konami insist that the revenue from the game sales are not owed to CNB.
So what is CNB planning to do? Well, it turns out that the bank is suing Konami for over $8.9-million in damages on multiple grounds including fraud, breach of contract, recovery of personal property and many more legal terms that would be slightly pointless
to go through.
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