Due to the actor’s copyright, the 17+ Judgment game series is likely to be closed

Game Judgment is in big trouble.

In an effort to protect actor Takuya Kimura’s image, his management company is making things difficult for SEGA.

Takuya Kimura is certainly not a strange name in the Asian entertainment industry. Dubbed “Japan’s sexiest male god”, Kimura is always sought after by entertainment companies to play the lead role in movies.

For this reason, in 2018, when SEGA developer RGG Studio wanted to make a spin-off series of the hit game franchise Yakuza, they invited Kimura to play the main character Takayuki Yagami.

This game has achieved great success with many awards and sold more than 1 million copies worldwide. On September 21, the sequel to the game Lost Judgment will be released worldwide.

It is a pity that the Judgment series shows no sign of coming to PC even though the Yakuza series is confirmed to be cross-platform in the future. According to newly received information, it turns out that Judgment and Lost Judgment’s failure to come to PC is due to the intervention of talent management company Johnny & Associates – the company currently managing Takuya Kimura.

More specifically, according to a source in Japan, Johnny & Associates and SEGA are arguing over the decision to bring the game to PC via Steam. SEGA believes that the PC gamer market is very large and if it ignores this market, it will be a huge loss.

Meanwhile, Johnny & Associates said they do not want the game to be on PC for fear that when it comes to this platform, the image of the artist (ie Kimura) will not be protected.

Sources in Japan said that if the two do not reach an agreement soon, the Judgment series will end with a second part, Lost Judgment.

In general, it can be seen that the decision of Johnny & Associates company, although partly correct, also shows the short-sightedness of the company. This company is afraid that their star image will be used by modders for nude mods or worse cases.

The model of Yagami (played by Takuya Kimura) has been extracted from the game a long time ago, showing that the console exclusivity hasn’t changed the problem.

However, they do not understand that the model of the Yagami character has been taken out of Judgment on PS4 by modders for a long time and used for many different projects. The console exclusivity won’t stop that either. Not only that, we also noticed that many gamers did not think about using Yagami’s model for negative purposes until Johnny & Associates company mentioned it.

This isn’t the first time Johnny & Associates has messed with SEGA. More specifically, in 2018, at the Judgment game release event (called Judge Eyes in Japan), this company deleted all images of Takuya Kimura from Famitsu newspaper (Japan’s largest game magazine). .

Johnny and Associate Company requested that Takuya Kimura’s picture be removed from the Famitsu newspaper.

The fact that Johnny & Associates is causing trouble for SEGA is having a huge impact on RGG Studio. The developer has planned that Judgment will be a series of games using Beat em Up gameplay while Yakuza will from now on bring Turn-Based JRPG gameplay. If Judgment ends, RGG Studio will have to come up with another Beat em Up series or reuse Beat em Up for the Yakuza. Reusing Beat em Up for the Yakuza series would be a pity because this decision goes against what RGG Studio has established for protagonist Ichiban Kasuga.

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