companyNintendoAnd Namco (minigames in loading screens, started in Ridge Racer), Warner Bros (Nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor), SEGA (GPS arrows from Crazy Taxi)…
I know “Nintendo bad” is a popular narrative but they’re far from the only one.
The biggest annoyance is that patents doesn’t prevent usage… Just require permission… they could ask anything or nothing, it just would need to be acceptable. And well here we are.
Why rely on someone else’s go-ahead if you can just do something different? They didn’t patent it for no reason - they want a cut if someone using it makes a bunch of money, and likely won’t give you the go-ahead without that guarantee.
Ofc, but that is the issue. Make the cut reasonable about some devs will be willing to pay the price.
The Namco one ran out in 2015, right on time for SSDs. Though I guess we could still use them for shader compilation 😴
The GPS arrow is patented?
Sega applied for and was awarded U.S. Patent 6,200,138 – “Game display method, moving direction indicating method, game apparatus and drive simulating apparatus” – in 2001. The mechanics in the “138 patent” describe an arcade cabinet similar to Sega’s previous arcade game Harley-Davidson & L.A. Riders (1997), but also describe the arrow navigation system and pedestrian avoidance aspects that were used in Crazy Taxi.
In 2001, Electronic Arts and Fox Interactive released The Simpsons: Road Rage, which reviews identified as being clearly inspired by the gameplay of Crazy Taxi. In this game, the player controlled one of The Simpsons characters as they drive around Springfield, bringing passengers to these destinations in a way like in Crazy Taxi. In December 2001, Sega brought Fox Entertainment, Electronic Arts, and developer Radical Games Ltd. to court over this infringement of the 138 patent. The case, Sega of America, Inc. v. Fox Interactive, et al., was settled in private for an unknown amount. The 138 patent is considered to be one of the most important patents in video game development.
company Nintendo
We from Nintendo would appreciate it if you stopped inventing things immediately. Innovation is a protected activity.
If only it was just Nintendo
patents should not exist
The original idea behind them had some merit: in exchange for showing everyone else exactly how to do a cool new thing, you got to temporarily be the only one to profit from it. They’ve devolved into parenting general ideas (see the shopping cart patent) and fucking over anyone who finds a way to make the idea work, though.
The key is “temporarily” though. Even in the 18th century and prior when technology evolved at the pace of a snail on sedatives that meant 5, maybe 10, at most 15 years.
Then in the 90s the world’s international cartel of IP rights got together and decided they should make it 20 years everywhere, just so corporations can monopolize anything they make for the entire the duration of its usefulness. With the speed of progress today I’d be surprised if most aren’t obsolete before they become available to the general public. 3D printing is only a thing now because Stratasys was hoarding the FDM patent since the fucking 90s.
Shit needs to go back down to 5 years again.
I disagree, if I spend time and money to figure out how to solve a problem efficiently, why shouldn’t I get to profit from that idea?
The above only applies to hardware patents, software patents however should not extist.
Regardless, if a company are not actively using a patent, as in a product themselves or through licensing, for X years, then the patent should be void.
It’s a bandaid fix though. Abolishing capitalism so that we could focus on innovation without needing to monetise it in order to eat is a better idea.
Software patents don’t exist in the real world. It’s just those dumb Americans living in their fantasy world who do it. Dumb fucks
I’m not anti-profit. I’m anti state-granted monopoly.
If you invented it first, you already have advantages: expertise, brand, speed, know-how, first-mover position, customer trust. Profit should come from executing better, not from getting the state to forbid competitors from improving on your idea.
Patents are not capitalism; they are government-enforced market exclusion.
Without patent protection it would be impossible to bring anything new on the market unless you were allready one of the big companies.
Expertise, brand, speed, know-how, first-mover position, customer trust etc. are wothless if multinational mega conglomerate can just copy your homework and use their wealth to quickly massproduce your thing and spread it to every market of the world.
Of course it’s work finding solutions to problems and you should be able to live off your work. And in capitalism, a patent sometimes is the only option to do so.
However, patents and other forms of “intellectual property” are absolutely illogical and amoral. Nobody ever made a completely new thing. Every innovation builds on so much knowledge accumulated by so many people that came before. It’s absolutely nonsensical that an advancement that’s 99 % an achievement of humanity and 1 % of a single person should belong to that single person.
The solution to this is supposed to be the time limit: if your invention builds on a very recent invention, you may have to get permission from that inventor, but older inventions become common property and can be freely built upon. If that time limit gets too long, which it absolutely has, then that can end up causing more harm than good.
I disagree, patents makes sense for normal citizens, it gives them a legal framework to fight against a company just taking the invention from them without compensation.
As for the 99% vs 1% contribution, remember that it is usually the last 1% of a project that consumes the most time.
Except 99% of the time, the company bankrupts the person who invented it (or threatens to) and then buys it out from under them through financial coersion and then make millions or billions in profit while giving the person who spent years or decades of effort developing it less than 1% of its worth.
That’s a weak argument because everything used by normal citizens is, in practice, always used by the big corpos against the normal citizens in much greater quantity and with much more force.
Now that I think of it, it’s no argument at all because I already admitted, that under capitalism, you might not have another choice to get paid for your work. That still doesn’t make it morally good or logically sound.
Normal citizens!? The cost of patent litigation can range from $2,000,000 to $4,000,000 on average per side.
I am sorry, but I have yet to meet a normal citizen that can afford a cost like this.
why shouldn’t I get to profit from that idea?
Why should you exclusively get to profit from that idea? In any case all innovation stands on the shoulders of giants supported by society at large. The idea of owning an idea in the first place is absurd, but setting that aside if someone will assert exclusive rights to an idea they should first repay society for all its indirect contributions to that idea, from past innovators to the workers whose labor makes it all possible. Or course this is impossible, meaning owning an idea automatically becomes absurd. And this is before we get to how pretty much all parents are based on publicly funded research. Government-granted monopolies should stay in the 19th century.
Because it is not really the idea specifically that you patent, you patent a method of making an idea work.
Potato potato, the point still stands: It’s impossible to come up with a new, say, car engine design without centuries’ worth of thermodynamics and assorted physics, millennia’s worth of metallurgy and the labor of hundreds if not thousands of people providing the food, water, electricity, manufactured goods, etc to make the act of innovation possible, and all those people have a claim to a piece of the pie.
That honestly makes patents even less justifiable.
You’re not protecting a finished product or a brand reputation, you’re protecting a method, meaning you’re legally blocking alternative implementations around a problem space.
That’s exactly the kind of artificial restriction that slows competition and incremental innovation.
Patents are supposed to be pretty specific and open to alternative implementations that don’t infringe, but the USPTO has made some pretty awful decisions, especially around early home computers.
That’s kind of my point.
If a system keeps getting abused to grant monopolies on absurdly broad concepts, maybe the problem isn’t just bad decisions, maybe the incentives themselves are broken.
And in practice, litigation costs alone already scare away competitors long before courts decide anything.
I’d call that a failure of capitalism, not of patents specifically. Any system stops working if you change the rules enough, and it was capitalism that allowed those rule changes.
I find it interesting that you draw the line at software, as if it doesn’t require time and money to create software solutions.
If it matters, I’m of the opinion that patents shouldn’t exist period. Capitalism loves to brag about encouraging competition and how much it benefits consumers, when in reality patents are super anticompetitive. An idea is one thing, executing the idea well is another. If I “take” your idea and execute it better than you, there shouldn’t be legislation stopping me
Imagine you are an inventor and come up with a brilliant new thing, and start a business to sell it. You even bring in people to help manufacture and make them a co-op. Doing everything ethically right. Selling a quality product that people want.
Then a multinational conglomerate sees it is selling well and they use their immense resources to scale up production, produce and sell it for half the price you can.
You and your co-op go out of business and megacorps shareholders pocket even more dividends.
Thats why patents should exist in a capitalist hellscape.
That argument proves the problem is scale and market power, not lack of patents.
Giving everyone a legal weapon sounds fair in theory, but in practice the biggest companies have the best lawyers, the biggest patent portfolios, and the most money to litigate. Patents often become a moat for incumbents, not a shield for small inventors.
A pro-market answer would be: reduce barriers to entry, punish fraud, enforce contracts, maybe protect trade secrets narrowly, but don’t ban competitors from building better versions.
I still think the patents need limitations.
1 year limit if not actively being used for a product in production.
10yr total limit.
Something like a video game mechanic should be limited to 2 years from first use.
Patents should be a limited way to protect and support innovation. Patent hoarding needs to be stopped.
Drug patents should have same limitations unless its something the government deems too critical, and then the company should be reimbursed for their research costs and the patent killed.
Your proposal is definitely less bad than the current system, but it still assumes innovation needs a government referee deciding who gets exclusivity, for how long, and when taxpayers should compensate private research.
That’s the part I can’t get behind.
If the product is not commercially viable without monopoly protection or public reimbursement, maybe the business model is the issue. And if the government reimburses the company, that just means society absorbs the risk while the company keeps the upside.
Who decides the reimbursement amount? Who pays for failed research? Taxpayers? Competing companies? Consumers?
Private companies should be rewarded by the market when they create value, not guaranteed protection from competition and then reimbursed when the state decides the invention is important.
Shorter patents reduce the damage, but they don’t remove the contradiction: a “limited monopoly” is still a monopoly.
I “take” your idea and execute it better than you, there shouldn’t be legislation stopping me
THANK YOU. Exactly. Competition is supposed to decide who wins, not the state. If your invention is genuinely great, you should dominate because you innovate faster, manufacture better, support customers better, reduce costs better, and improve continuously, not because the government threatens competitors for 20 years.
Ideally, yeah. Unfortunately, we live under capitalism, so there should be safeguards for people who actually make and invent things to benefit from their creations, for a reasonable time. Unfortunately, we live under capitalism, and this became another tool for corporations.
But that’s not capitalism.
If you invent something and someone can make it cheaper than you can then they should profit off it not you.
Socialism is when government does stuff. Capitalism is when bad things happen.
Nice to meet you, Mr. Edison.
I’d say patents should be limited to physical goods. Game mechanics should never have been allowed.
Generally speaking, most game mechanics are not copyright-able, not patentable. Game mechanics themselves tend to be treated as base components, as in, like a drum beat or a bass line. It’s rare cases where those are distinct, usually in context (see Vanilla Ice & Under Pressure). Because a beat or bass line can be so basic as a component, it’s considered part of the arrangement and not the composition itself. Video game mechanics can likewise be in this configuration.
For instance, summoning heroes (Nintendo loss) is a mechanic / part of the composition of that game, but the larger video game is a particular arrangement. Specific characters (pikachu) can very much be copyrighted individually, but games themselves are typically less liable for patents / copyright, and so on.
Also, for good measure, since it’s a massive benefit to the freedom of expression. Video games would be a depressing medium if people could capitalize on mechanics like patent trolls.
To be clear, some technologies used in association with video games can be patented, but that’s when a patentable technology is combined with a game, which is much less common in the medium.
Yeah you can tell this is not real because a) it’s greentext and b) you can’t copyright game mechanics.
If you could we wouldn’t have video game genres, or like 99% of board games.
There is one major exception where Warner Bros. holds a highly restrictive patent on the Shadow of Mordor Nemesis system. The mechanic allows non-player characters to remember past encounters with the player, dynamically changes their personalities, and rise (or fall) through enemy ranks. If you never played it, it was a unique mechanic that I’ve never seen in other games since. The patent prevents other studios from utilizing this system and is set to expire on August 11, 2036.
TL, DR: Fuck Warner Bros for patenting this.
I keep hearing this one, the system was ok but I didn’t really care for it that much. It’s just an eternal list of respawning orks that I will kill.
Not sure that’s fair. It was the first pass at something that couple have been embraced, expanded and developed. Hell, it signposted the changed aspects and immunities of the orks as they grew.
But throw that into another harder game type where it’s on you to remember who has escaped and got wiser and it has real potential. Especially with the superhero meme of catching villains but never ending them. Some real organic potential to hit the pained hero arc where this one is such a pain maybe I should just kill this one…
the patent wasnt even granted until last yesr or 2 iirc, because it kept on getting found too general…long as you don’t exactly copy their code your good.
the reason noones done something similar since is because you have to build your whole game around it
The patent went through in 2021.
and the game was released in 2014, the reason noone has done similar isnt becauss of some patent. nobody reads patents that’s the whole point of patent trolling
Mini Games during loading screens are patented which is why no one does it.
There’s been some, Bamco had the parent for minigames during loading screens until 2015.
Active Time Battle (ATB) was under patent until 2010.
Games are just software, and software patents are definitely (and unfortunately) a thing.
This is about patents. There have been plenty of game mechanics patents ever since Richard Garfield opened the floodgates by patenting the collectable card game concept.
What about that arrow in Simpsons driving game? Didn’t they get in trouble for using what Sega patented in Crazy Taxi?
Settled privately, no ruling on patent
Huh… I had never heard of this one. I swear I’ve played games with the arrow like that since
Counterpoint: Summoning characters by throwing an item and having the character appear at the position of the item has been patented by Nintendo, as has using a summoned character as a hang glider.
Japanese patent law is pretty terrible.
Its less terrible than you think, Nintendo has been suffering setback after setback in the totality of their legal battle with PalWorld, in both Japan and the US.
Basically… both the US and Japanese versions of the patent battles are having things like… Japan just actually rejects a Nintendo patent as being too vague and non novel… the USPTO does a thing it almost never does and re-reviews a patent it had previously given to Nintendo as possibly being vague bullshit as well… Niintendo just completely rewrites the lawsuit in the middle of pre-trial, while also claiming violations of patents that it filed for after the lawsuit started.
…thats actually largely a bunch of bullshit, that has a decent likelihood of pissing off the judges and arbiters involved as essentially being legal misconduct.
Good to hear, although the mere presence of a bullshit lawsuit can do a lot of damage to a smaller company.
The problem remains, however, that the patents in question were granted in the first place, as were the retroactive addenda (which is a terrible “feature” of Japanese patent law).
Game mechanics are patentable both in principle and in practice. And that’s a problem.
Those are litigation & therefore in an indeterminate state. They have lost recently within Japanese law just this week on their touchscreens.
Also, IANAL. Nothing I say should be considered formal legal advice.
Shame Ubisoft didn’t do this for climbing a tower to reveal the surrounding area in the map tbh
I’m actually sick of this one. Way too many games do it. Even goddamn final fantasy 7 remake 2 did a shitty version of it
Silksong did it so much better. Just listen out for the sound of song.
RIP super soaker water pistols
Work around the patent by making them only moderately soaking
Still salty about that “Sanity System” bullshit patent by …surprise surprise…nintendo.
Easily solved with some creative thinking:
Create a “mental congruence” system.
It’s not just a title replacement, as congruence is a different metric than sanity and is more broad generally, and can be influenced by information, cognitive dissonance, and smelling your own farts.
3d sound. Look it up.
Is the nemesis system finally back on the free market?
That should never have been allowed to be patented. Its way too generalized
Missed opportunity to ask if the nemesis system is back on the menu…
Now I’m imagining your in game nemesis following you into various pause/configuration windows if you take too long.
The Nemesis system in the LOTR games is a perfect example
How does that work?
Didn’t Warframe do basically a nemesis system with Kuva Liches, Sisters of Parvos and Technocyte Codas?
Recurring boss that you need to find the weakness of via trial and error, can be killed for super nice loot or turned into a minion?
Taunts you and acts as a personal nemesis with a generated personality and looks?
Isn’t that basically the only example? How many other cases do you ever hear people talk about? Obviously there are others, I see others given in this post, but you never really hear about them.
When games had long load times, there was a company that patented putting short and quick to load mini games on screen instead of loading screens you just stared at.
Dragon ball fighting games did the little cloud thing
And nobody pateneted the loading screen slideshow with game tips? Im shocked
Unironically it was likely done too many times before someone thought of patenting it.
Did that stop Nintendo lately?
I thought there was one on games during loading screens or something as well
Nothing mentioned in the post but I am 99% sure Anon is talking about Nemesis system from Shadow of Mordor/Shadow of War.
Is there any other notable example of this?
yep, minigames on loading screens.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2015/12/loading-screen-game-patent-finally-expires
pointless in the age of direct storage and high SSD speeds.
if you’ve lived before that: corporate thanks you for patiently waiting while counting their unrealized gains and lost potential on spreadsheets and ppts
So minigames when shaders compile?
Or when waiting in a multiplayer lobby.
Splatoon was really good at this one
Didnt knew any besides that one before found this article.
For those who do not want to click:
- Nemesis mechanic by WB (expire 2036)
- Mini-games during loading screen by Namco (expired in 2015)
- Ping system - like pinging on the map so your team mates can see or pay attention to it. EA (expires 2039) FUCK EA
- Dialogue wheel like in Mass Effect - fuck EA (s 2029)
- Direction arrow - racing games, Crazy Taxi style - Sega (expired in 2018 but doubt it will be ever used again)
- Pokemon’s fight and catch for later fighting mechanic - fuck Nintendo and Game Freak
- Active Time Battle - not sure, I dont play JRPGs but this one was introduced in FFIV - Square Enix (expired 2012)
- Proprietary guitar controller in sync with gameplay (Guitar hero) - Ubisoft (2029)
- Mouse controlled flight for aircraft games - Gaijin (expires 2033)
- Surprisingly, other plastic musical instruments for Rock Band - Harmonix that was fighting with Konami for rights (expires 2032)
Nemesis system is probably the most notable because it was a great mechanic that everyone liked. And it is only been used in 2 games and never again.
What is the nemesis system?
In the games you’d have normal enemies that scale according to progress in the game. Like say Assassins creed where you start with basic goons with swords and later get armored crusaders to fight with.
But then you also would get a special enemy - mini boss orc that is a leader of a group/location or just a loner hunter. They will spawn at random in cities, and outside. Not sure if they can spawn at the missions tho. If you kill one, his death will be passed on his peers who will seek vengeance. Some of them will try to escape if they feel you are winning. They can creep on you again later. Sometimes orc can be resurrected and become stronger. There are also different types of them. Say one is bruiser, the other is tracker, third might be hunter type, and so on.
There are multiple difficulty tiers of these special mini bosses that are interconnected. Some have beef with each other and will infight. Some will team-up to kill you. Later in game there is a technique change that I will not spoil cause it is integral to the plot.
It is an extremely unique game mechanic that pretty much made Shadow of Mordor/War games into cult classics. It has multiple layers to it and makes each playthrough is quite a unique one. I strongly recommend to play at the very least the first one.
Kill a mini boss of an orc horde. Orc horde gains a new boss that evolves around how you killed thier predecessor. Rinse and repeat and the game gets harder and harder while you also git gud.
Oh that sounds really cool. I liked how Zelda got more difficult monsters as you killed more.
It’s even deeper than that. They will have names and personalities. If you defeat one by cutting off its arm, it will reappear later with a prosthetic arm and maybe even some dialogue about your last encounter. They keep all the scars from your battles.
That’s so cool! I’m going to read up on that after dinner. Are the game it’s in worth playing or is it going to supporting a shit company?
Wasn’t the Pokemon ones ruled as invalid or not registrable with big N fight with Pal World?
I wonder if we could make a gamejam game that violates all of these.
Wow I am now very tempted to come up with the ‘dialogue nonagon’ or ‘dialogue septagon’.
Like… are you kidding me?
At what point, how many n’s does the polygon need before it legally becomes a circle?
https://patents.google.com/patent/US20070226648A1/en
I actually think you coukd get around this via using a polygon with an odd number of sides, and not use a moving ‘selection box’ to indicate the selected category, but instead, just overdraw/shadow/highlight/bold/animate/colorchange/font change the text.
Then, then all you have to do is not offer ‘classes’ (ie set categories that define a static dialogue tree) as the primary options.
So you could just make those ‘classes’ dynamic within themselves, a full web or mesh, not a tree of boxes, and then just offer ‘mesh entry points’, not ‘category descriptors’.
To me the most insane thing about this is that they appear to patenting not just the visual style of a dailogue wheel… but also the concept of a dialogue tree, combined with the visual elements.
The Guitar Hero one is crazy. They patented pressing buttons?
Correction needs to be made. Albeit picture in the article is Guitar Hero, that point talks about a real guitar as a controller for Rocksmith. Patent is probably for a cable and a technique that is used in game to detect notes (basically a smart and fast tuner).
But its GUITAR SHAPED!
LOL
Holy shit some of those are stupid. How did the pinging on a map ever get by? I know I was pinging (on the map and in the person view) in games way before 2019. MOUSE CONTROLLED FLIGHT? Fucking war thunder. You point the mouse and the plane turns is really a fucking patent?
Need For Speed: Underground 2 (2004) has the arrow. Portal 2 (2011 IIRC?) has ping. Did Sega and EA, respectively, actually get cuts for that or…?
How does Portal 2 have ping? Isn’t this a multiplayer mechanism?
Portal 2 has a whole coop campaign.
In the article it states that:
While EA owns the patent, they’ve generously allowed other games to implement similar mechanics—so far.
It’s a rare case where a patent actually benefits the industry, ensuring that intuitive communication remains available to all developers rather than being locked away.
Some games can take 10 years to make, someone should start now
Legend of dragoon has a frustrating but amazing additions system no one else does today. With wireless controller lag I’m not certain gust of wind dance would be possible anyway, but it was so different from everything before and after it.
I’m convinced this is why.
I never played that game - so what does this mechanic do?
Overlapping squares shrink into the character performing their move. You attack or counter based on the opponents reaction to you, you sync your response to the squares which train you timing. Different attacks have different timing. Gust of wind dance is complicated.
Gusto wind De’ Dance
Wireless controller latency is definitely not so bad for timed hits with visual indicators to be impossible. I’m sure many people played Clair Obscur with wireless controllers just fine.
Sadly, the real reason is because we’ll buy any old slop if we see enough adverts for it, or enough streamers wanking off over it.
Irrelevant, defeatist, and shitting on people what did nothing wrong. Go sit in the corner. Think about what you’ve done.
When everything had long loading times (and we still have them from time to time) there was a genius idea : minigames on the loading screen to pass the time.
ONE company did this, patented the concept and till then no one is allowed to do that.
Which company?
It was Namco, and the patent expired in 2015.
So did long loading screens
Tfw you can’t read the loading screen gameplay tips because your computer is too fast
