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Yeah. While I agree that Major League Baseball is usually over-the-top and occasionally out of touch with its fanbase, I think this whole situation is getting blown seriously out of proportion. They're enforcing their trademark, which they have every right to do - that's the entire point of a trademark. In fact, it should be surprising that OOTP used the MLB trademarks for this long without issue.
From what Markus said, he's optimistic that they'll work out a licensing deal for OOTP16, but he also said that if worse comes to worst, and they make serious feature removal demands, he just won't license. End of story. The two outcomes for OOTP16 that I see as plausible are 1) MLB licenses OOTP and we get proper team names with a very minimal feature reduction (steroid storylines and the like might be cut for MLB leagues only, for example), or 2) MLB doesn't license OOTP, and within a day of release, someone will have an MLB Quickstart ready to go.
Let's not lose sight of the big picture here - the MLB is aware of OOTP. That means that OOTP is getting some serious recognition, which should be some of the best news ever. There's no reason to automatically assume that MLB is going to hack and slash OOTP to bits in licensing negotiations, and that OOTPD will let it happen. Will they try? Probably. Will they succeed? Markus has already decided that they will not.
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