Does konami still holds the rights for all the castlevania titles ever released?

[HEL(L)ICOPRION]

i'm curious to know if there is a real chance to see the castlevania classic games on steam or if only includes the rebooted series...

[SirJonSecada]

What does konami having the Castlevania rights have to do with the classic titles' Steam distribution?
I guess if Konami and Steam agree on that, there wouldn´t be a problem for their Steam release. But somehow I doubt that will happen.

[HEL(L)ICOPRION]

because if a publisher holds partially a right to a franchise (name, game world or some of the titles of a series) i think that they can't release said games on a different platform...this is my guess. that's why i've asked...anyway, why you doubt it? recently we are seeing lot of games released on steam which belonged to different platforms now hitting for the first time pc..why castlevania should be different?

[Blink]

lol.. Konami self-publishes. Nobody owns the rights to Konami games but Konami.
Even a quick look at CastleVania's wikipedia page would have told you that much.

[HEL(L)ICOPRION]

so when codemaster owned the right on the Operation Flashpoint series, bohemian interactive still released the first game on the same name...then they changed in arma cold war assault, i'm saying this cause sometimes things are not as easy as saying "publisher x owns the copiright to game y", also saying that konami owns the right on the CV franchise means that they get money from those titles, but i don't know if they can rerelase them on different platforms (unluckly wikipedia doesn't give me this kind of infos)...i've already done my researches, i'm not asking for infos that i can read from the internet, i'm asking opinions to long time fans about the chance to see old CV titles rereleased, if it's technically possible...

[Blink]

What you're asking makes no sense.

The only way Konami would not have the rights to release their own games on any platform would be if they licensed those rights to another company and were forbidden to self-publish under a non-compete clause; which would be stupid on their part.

Just because a CastleVania game was published for the NES, or SNES, or MSX or whatever system doesn't mean the company now has no right to put it out on other platforms. That's just crazy and would only be possible if the company signed a contract saying they wouldn't.

Even if the console company owned the publishing rights for that specific platform, they still couldn't contest a release on another platform unless Konami signed a contract specifically stipulating they would not release the game on other platforms; and even then it could probably be argued in court that any such system is now long since dead and generates no revenue for any party interested in stopping Konami from publishing their titles for newer platforms.

Konami created the game franchise, and they published the games themselves, all they had to do was pay licensing fees for the permission to publish their game on a platform. That doesn't give the platform holder any rights over the product by default.

How do you think Chrono Trigger and older Final Fantasy games were published on Playstation? Square-Enix owns the rights to those properties and they can publish on any platform they want. Nothing is stopping Konami from putting out PC versions of their older games from the 80's and 90's if they really wanted to.

The NES and SNES titles in particular should be easy to re-release running in emulators. As those consoles are very well emulated in 99% of cases.

[HEL(L)ICOPRION]

ok, my bad