Nintendo is trying to patent some broad Tears of the Kingdom mechanics
kotaku.com
kotaku.com
The potential for killing off novelty entirely (or slowing it down to a trickle) in game development is definitely there long term.
This reminds of Cory Doctorow's recent essay on the trend towards owning and extracting rent on things rather than actually producing them[0].
<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fast_loader&oldid...>
You might be made permanently destitute and homeless however.
As it stands, IPR works enough that patent trolls are angry that it's too easy to get junk patents thrown out. But it still requires you to know in advance what to fight, to spend money on lawyers fighting it, and to delay actually using the invention you think isn't patented until the patent is actually thrown out. Some developer who independently invents loading screen mini-games probably isn't going to even know about the loading screen games patent until either legal tells them to remove the mini-game or they launch and get sued by Namco.
An example of this: do you remember VRML chatrooms? Worlds, Inc was one of them, and they got US8082501B2[1], a patent on having a character in a multiplayer virtual world. They sued Activision[2] over the span of nine years, while also hitting up other game developers for money, including Microsoft[3]. Microsoft actually tried filing an IPR case[4], but the courts acted first to invalidate the patent before the IPR could go through[5].
[0] https://www.uspto.gov/patents/ptab/trials/inter-partes-revie...
[1] https://patents.google.com/patent/US8082501B2
[2] https://www.gamesindustry.biz/activision-blizzard-sued-for-p...
[3] https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/litigation/Texas%20Western...
[4] https://portal.unifiedpatents.com/ptab/case/IPR2021-00277
[5] https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/ptab-filings%2FIPR2021-00...
As if making something buzz is fucking "non-obvious"
I played Bayonetta for the first time a few months ago on my steam deck, and during loading times you were able to practice combos and stuff. Unfortunately it only lasted for a split second since it loads so fast from the SSD, I'm guessing it's original release on console disc allowed players a bit more time to try it while it was loading from the disc.
For instance if Minecraft or any of the multide of crafting games had a patent on sticking together objects we wouldn't have BoTWToTK in the first place.
My understanding is that it's patented, though. So no one else is making anything like it. No other experiments about what else those mechanics can do.
The enemies are also generated with perks and flaws based on the available game mechanics. These orcs return to fight you again, they often have upgrades themselves to resist or be immune to the ways you killed them previously.
Taken individually none of these mechanics are novel I don't think. But this particular implementation is pretty unique. I'd love to see similar things in other games. Like Mech pilot rivalries in a Mecha game or something similar. But games aren't copying it, despite how well received it was. I can only think it's due to some kind of patent licensing issue.
Really, patents should just expire after 5 years by default, possibly with exceptional grants for 10 years. I think 5-10 years is plenty of time to establish yourself in a market, and if at that point your competitors start competing, well, you had your grace period.
So being able to secure a patent before its first implementation is made is pretty much a non-negotiable requirement.
So, yes, folks should be able to secure a parent before they're able to build and sell a working product, _but_ it should be a requirement that they build and sell within a shorter time-frame than the length of the patent, e.g. the patent is for X years and I have to build and sell within 0.2*X years or the patent is rejected.
Also, patents make sense also for things that are not for sale to general public - for example, an invention to improve some machines that you use in your factory, but aren't selling to other factories i.e. your competitors; consumer products are the thing that is visible, but B2B products matter even more.
Try and name just one game released in the last decade with a completely novel game mechanic.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTVDSOnPLns
It's a pity nothing else since seems to use the same mechanic / concept.
It takes capitalism from the realm of physical property to a realm of "ideas as property".
Patents to software were are a mistake. Patents in general are a mistake IMHO.
One of the major issues with patents is that they take too long to expire. If the goal is for me to be able to get up and running before a big competitor takes the idea, I need a few years, not a lifetime.
I do find it amusing how much people call startup small and fast and yet some large company can swoop in and execute on their idea and knock them out of business if it weren't for a patent?
It's a cute story, but I suspect the real innovation gains from those small inventors are a teeny, tiny, itty bitty fraction of the harms to innovation caused by the patent system. It's not a good bargain.
I don't think anyone would really argue otherwise, certainly I would not. I'm just advocating for reform because I think the idea is really valuable.
That's the sticker on the front. Not what actually happens though.
Wonder if the Patent Office could be sued for false advertising? "it doesn't do what you're selling it as..." :)
Meanwhile big companies can just spam patent applications, amassing a strategic stockpile that makes it less devastating if one of them is invalidated
This whole structure serves the interests of big companies even if they are infringing!
If you don't patent an idea that you use somebody else will and they will extract rent from you.
So you must "defect" by paying lawyers to search through every product you make looking for ideas you've used that don't have a patent.
You cannot "cooperate" by refusing to patent ideas.
You cannot "cooperate" by refusing to inform people they've violated your patent, because somebody else who uses the idea may also be granted a patent and now you have to go to court or settle.
The result is a flood of articles saying "Apple patents obvious idea X! What bastards!", when in fact every major corporation has no sane option to avoid that behavior.
In the prisoner's dilemma, the highest theoretical yield for each prisoner is achieved by everyone "cooperating", but that isn't really the case here.
The fixed patent fees and inadequate institutions granting them mean big companies are disproportionately able to rack up on patents and increase their yield as they "defect" and play the game. They could lobby to strongly restrict or even abolish certain types of patents but they don't have much of an interest to do so, since patents solidify their already strong position in the market.
No, it's to own _your invention_ so someone else (with more money) can't mass-produce your invention while you're only able to produce and sell in Peoria.
Are many patents rubbish in one form or another? Yes. Are some patents nothing more than an "idea" without an invention? Yes.
Does that mean all patents are just an "idea"? NO.
Invention != Idea.
> Patents in general are a mistake IMHO.
We can and should improve the patent system by shortening the term lengths, denying "obvious" patents, limiting the ability of someone to patent an invention that they never exploit (i.e. build and sell).
None of that means we should toss out patents entirely.
- They sued Andamiro for Pump it Up, a competing dance game with five panels arranged diagonally. Andamiro was able to settle with Konami, possibly because they'd found some prior art that limited the DDR patent, which is the only reason why we still have PIU today.
- They sued RoXoR for In The Groove, a proprietary[2] fork of StepMania, which is a DDR clone. In The Groove was designed as a conversion kit for DDR cabinets as well as having dedicabs produced by Andamiro and then themselves. RoXoR settled and Konami basically got to kill ITG as part of the settlement.
- They sued Pentavision for having keysounding in DJMAX, a competing DJ game that was popular in Korea. They settled with the end result being that Konami gets a permanent share of DJMAX sales and Japanese distribution rights for that game.
- They sued AmuseWorld for EZ2DJ, although to be fair this one looks literally identical to five-key beatmania. They... sort of just rebranded to EZ2AC and kept going, as far as I can tell from the Wikipedia page?
Harmonix was involved with the ITG lawsuits at one point, so they wound up designing a more complicated and worse design-around for the keysounding patent in Guitar Hero. Other rhythm games not made by Konami also tend to have very generic keysounds (e.g. it just plays one sample).
As for extracting rent... oh boy. There's a reason why rhythm games disappeared from American and European arcades. To explain that I first need to provide some context. The ownership model that western arcade operators are used to is that they buy a very expensive machine (in the $10k+ range) and then get to rent it out to people for $1 a play or so. This is why private collectors and retro arcades exist and used to be how rhythm games worked too.
Konami changed all this in Japan over two decades ago. First they added online capability with eAmusement - you could pay a monthly fee to get your arcade cabinets auto-updated. Then they added score tracking through NFC cards through the same service. Around 2011 they switched to a licensing model where arcade owners have to pre-pay a rev share for each play, and as part of this, the machines have always-online DRM. If your machine isn't connected to Konami's eAmusement VPN, it won't boot, and if your revshare isn't paid up it won't accept payment from users.
Outside of East Asia, arcade operators balked at all of this. Originally this just meant not having eAmusement passes to save scores on, but after they moved to licensing instead of ownership, we stopped getting DDR cabinets altogether. Dave & Busters still wanted to operate DDR though, so they somehow got Round1[3] to negotiate a joint order of DDR White Cabs running a special build of DDR A with an offline mode. You're probably reading this and thinking that D&B is the good guy, except my local Round1's arcade techs hate them for this, because major game updates are now expensive upgrade kits that frequently brick machines[4]. Furthermore, D&B is penny-pinching right now, so the A3 upgrade for all the NA-region DDR cabs got delayed by like a year while Round1 renegotiated with Konami.
If you're not D&B or Round1, you either operate decades-old DDR cabinets, Pump It Up[5], or StepManiaX, another dance game by the ITG people with better patent design-arounds.
[0] When you press a button, the game makes the sound. It's why you know immediately when you suck at Beatmania.
[1] DanceDanceRevolution, not East Germany. (Formerly?) Known as "Dancing Stage" in Europe for this reason.
[2] They convinced StepMania's developers to relicense to MIT so they could license songs for ITG
[3] Round1 is an arcade chain from Osaka with a US branch and a frightening ability to get Konami to license import cabs for the US. It is the closest you'll get to the Japanese arcade experience in the US and you could probably film a shot-for-shot recreation of Lost in Translation in there.
[4] https://twitter.com/EvilDave219/status/1691599463276564579
[5] I have no clue if Andamiro's also charges revshare and requires always-online but I suspect they are.
Is it something more nuanced like playing the sound on the press without waiting for the next frame to tick?
You know those YouTube videos of people playing whole songs on a DAW control surface? beatmania is literally just that with a scrolling note chart and a judgment of your performance, except it came out in like 1997.
Harmonix keysounding works a bit differently. If you press the strum bar with the wrong frets pressed, it plays a generic error noise and cuts out the guitar/bass/drum portion of the song until you play another note correctly. It's arguably easier to chart since you just need separate audio tracks for each instrument, but the main reason this was done was to avoid a second Konami lawsuit.
[0]: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/pc/exclusive-exploring-i-guita...
A few years prior they did NOT have that kind of money. The history of Guitar Hero is that RedOctane was involved in manufacturing third-party softpads for people importing DDR home games from Japan. They saw GuitarFreaks in a Japanese arcade and contracted Harmonix to build a game around a guitar controller. The game they made, Guitar Hero, was startlingly low budget, with loads of covers[1]. Nobody had any money to license patents.
In terms of the cost of actually keysounding a track, relative to Harmonix's patent workaround... I'm not entirely sure. It could go either way. I could imagine some automated/cheap way to do 'good enough' keysounding could have been made, especially since they're already charting out note data.
[0] For example, I said Harmonix was involved in the ITG lawsuit but it was actually RedOctane who published ITG. I'd edit my comment but I can't find the edit link.
[1] Which arguably worked in the game's favor - I do remember people noting that the all-masters-all-the-time approach of Guitar Hero World Tour made playing vocals feel strange.
Still have a version of the old StepMania running on a Mac I bought in like 2002, with the ITG patch and probably 500+ songs. I bust that out from time to time. Still great fun.
Honestly I miss that whole scene, my local arcade had 10 or so guys that were really good and the online community was great too. Wish rhythm games made a comeback.
Speaking of UI/UX... that's actually the reason why I prefer Pump It Up to DDR right now. DDR A has this extremely irritating menu noise. If I want to switch from level 7 to 8, I have to BZZ-BZZ-BZZ-BZZ-BZZT up, close the level 7 folder, open the level 8 folder, BZZ-BZZ-BZZ-BZZ-BZZT down through the song list, etc. Pump's UI noises are far more tolerable, you can pick songs from the dance pad, and you can quickly get in and out of different level folders. StepManiaX actually takes this one step further and just makes the monitor a touch screen so you can swipe through songs.
DDR actually rebalanced their level curve a while back, so MAX 300 is now a level 15 instead of a 10-footer, and the scale goes up to 20. So there's harder stuff now, but top-level players still want stuff harder than that, and complain that DDR isn't giving it to them. I don't know about SMX but Pump has some pretty insane high-level charts[1] that I will probably never be good enough to clear.
What I find funny about it is that Breath of the Wild is a story-based game and competes with a movie or a book in a certain respect, but that DDG has no plot (though you could apply the "scene analysis" from the Meisner school to a situation like that.)
For a game like "Breath of the Wild" one is left wondering if you could patent a trope in a movie, as opposed to depending on this kind of IP law
https://theipcenter.com/2019/03/copyright-cartoon-images/
but DDR is something entirely different.
I believe that patent has expired now at this point, but it's the reason StepmaniaX doesn't have receptors.
Similarly this is the reason games like Guitar Hero/Rock Band/ITG have hallway style viewports instead of straight lines. It was to mitigate the patents on having things scroll towards receptors in a straight line.
> intellectual property is not like ordinary property at all, but constitutes a government grant of a costly and dangerous private monopoly over ideas. We show through theory and example that intellectual monopoly is not necessary for innovation and as a practical matter is damaging to growth, prosperity and liberty.
Note that "slippery slope" is usually used to refer to a logical fallacy [1]. Maybe this is something that could "snowball out of control"? [2] I'm not sure what other phrases could be used.
A slippery slope is often a legitimate concern.
Using it as the sole means to shut down an idea is often disingenuous, but so, too, is shutting down any concerns of a ”snowball effect” by calling it a logical fallacy.
The slippery slope fallacy argues that "if X happens, then eventually Y will happen as well", where Y is a more extreme version of X. This is not a valid logical inference.
That doesn't mean that there are never cases where X actually leads to Y. Just as calling out "appeal to authority" doesn't mean that an expert isn't often right, or just as "correlation is not causation" doesn't imply that correlation is never causation.
Many of our IP laws were put in place to incentivize creators, to increase creative output throughout society, if they no longer serve this purpose they should be repealed. Those who benefit will act as though these IP laws are a fundamental right, but if society at large decides they are no longer beneficial, there's nothing morally wrong with removing them.
I no longer give them my money. I would rethink this if they made the games available for PC or something more open. But the more I hear the less likely I am to start buying anything they produce.
But they really love trying to squeeze every cent and milking their customers to a point where it's disgusting.
My partner purchased a the latest Zelda and I can't even play it on my account on the same device: I need to buy another copy of the game (which obviously will never happen).
Don't buy digital, it's never worth it.
If they are linked to a different Nintendo online account they need to buy their own copy of the game?
Maybe I'm wrong about that...
They are a lot more permissive with their digital copies than I expected, honestly.
There have been other games where this has been problematic (Animal crossing I think limited some features per device instead of per account).
Usually most people only have one Switch so this never is a problem. However, if you've switched consoles and you didn't do System Transfer, you need to manually switch over the home console in order to get your offline play rights back.
Alternatively your partner may have explicitly set their home account to someone else's system. There's a mildly pirate-y[0] thing you can do with a friend where you log into your account on their system and they log into your system with their account, and then you have a shared game pool. In order to be able to play on your own account you need to swap the home console associations around so your friend's Switch is your home console and vice versa. But if you do this you can never play your own games on other accounts, since your friend's the one who took that half of the license.
[0] As in, it bends the rules of the DRM in ways Nintendo probably does not intend and thus probably violates a license agreement somewhere
Nintendo does a lot of stupid shit but this is one of the few things I think they have been really good about.
Nintendo games are rated highly by other Nintendo gamers, but people from the outside see things significantly more clear.
Everyone I know who loves games has a Switch in addition to at least a PS5/Xbox if not a gaming PC, and they play everything. Nintendo games are unique. They're a legitimate reason to still buy a six year old console, and millions of people do.
2021 was the first year that _half_ of households own at least one game console -- how many of those households owned just the one?
There is something special to folks on HN who don't realize the bubble they live in.
https://www.cta.tech/Resources/Newsroom/Media-Releases/2021/...
Somebody isn't seeing things clearly, that's for sure.
Funny how these gaming faction war posts haven't changed one bit from 15+ years ago when I was a preteen arguing about Xbox vs PS2 vs Gamecube on NeoGAF forums.
I just hope anyone continuing the tradition on HN are no older than that.
All of those claims are extremely valid.
Apparently, though, their corporate culture is VERY Japanese and kind of crappy. I know someone who negotiated with them directly and although the gentleman was and remains a massive fan of Nintendo, the experience put a bad taste in his mouth.
Wish Nintendo would also listen to fans and give some of their lesser IP a fresh coat of paint. Can't believe it's been nearly 20 years since a new F-Zero, and probably over a decade since we've had a decent Star Fox. Kid Icarus, Donkey Kong, Metroid and Earthbound could all use some love, too.
I recently fired up the original NES Zelda game and it was fun. I also got a switch and BoTW and the original is more fun. There is so much filler and repetitive game mechanics that don't add to the game at all in BoTW. Game companies keep adding stuff to lengthen game play loops and this ends up in tedious, repetitive gaming sessions which after some point I don't find enjoyable.
Its art though so to each their own and in my opinion you shouldn't be allowed to patent art.
Nintendo is very sparing in how often they make mainline games in their IP (besides Pokemon). Mario has had one main 3d game in a decade. Zelda had 6 years between BoTW and ToTK, and 5 years between BoTW and it's predecessor. Everyone of those (Mario and Zelda) until ToTK was completely different, with a different feel and different mechanics.
Yes, they use the same IP's for decades but they remain relevant because they do new things with those IP's. BoTW completely bucked the Zelda formula. ToTK was so successful because they didn't try to just ride off the success of its predecessor - they did a lot of new stuff.
A far better comparison to Fast N Furious would be Madden.
I like how with Batman and Joker movies different directors/actors have a different take on the characters or setting (gritty vs campy humor, etc.) and I don’t mind similar story elements being re-used. I don’t like that in most video games for some reason. Horizon Zero Dawn was awesome, same with Last of Us (game), haven’t looked at a sequels, they look like more of the same. Its okay for me to not like that in this art form and its okay for you (or others) to like it.
But "Link, the hero of time saves Zelda from Ganon, the great evil" is the whole point of the story in the Zelda games, that these three fates are intertwined for eternity and meant to constantly dance their dance.
>I like how with Batman and Joker movies different directors/actors have a different take on the characters or setting
Zelda does this massively, there's multiple interpretations of these characters because they are different living beings in the same lineage or whatever. Consider the toon games, where "Zelda" is a pirate girl with zero "Royal" character attributes.
I don't know what you are expecting or asking for. Hell, BoTW is ALSO another re-interpretation of the story and characters
Maybe the difference for me is with a movie, I’m just along for the ride and have no input into anything, but with a video game I’m playing the main character and when I’ve played that same exact main character with that same overall story arc I just don’t find it interesting. The other element I think is my age, I’m finding less consumable media (tv, movies, games, books, sports) enjoyable as I get older. There are things I still really enjoy but genres of them that I used to and now I don’t find interesting.
Go play the original Super Mario Bros, then Mario N64, then Mario Sunshine, then Paper Mario (wii edition), then Super Mario Galaxy, then Super Mario Odyssey. Sure all those games have Mario in it, but they’re only the same in the sense that the Mandalorian takes place in the same galaxy as Star Wars Ep 4. I would never compare this franchise (or Zelda) with Fast and Furious or even something like CoD. And I don’t know how you can call the IP repetitive when the only constant in all the games I listed is Mario. It’s not like FIFA that updates every year with a new roster and the exact same game.
The reason I love playing these game is because they do innovate and create completely new games even if it’s the same franchise.
I'm sure I've seen this mechanic about twenty years ago somewhere.
> Link and the objects he rides on move together at the same speed, rather than Link being technically stationary on top of a moving object as is common in the physics of other games.
This is just how physics work. Aside from the absurdity of trying to patent "simulating basic physics" , I'm sure simulations for this have been written countless times in the past decades.
The sad thing about this is that stupid patents are often accepted just fine, and Nintendo can later try and enforce them against some little studio that can't afford the lawyers to defend itself.
I've indeed seen this multiple times for example in Skyrim [1] and in Minecraft (trough mods)
I think I've seen every concept listed in the article before. Let's hope they don't get much out of it.
1: https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Skyrim:Arcane_Archer_Pack_Items#Lig...
Modding isn't even needed, the Channeling enchantment for tridents does this: https://minecraft.fandom.com/wiki/Channeling
>This is just how physics work. Aside from the absurdity of trying to patent "simulating basic physics" , I'm sure simulations for this have been written countless times in the past decades.
It's not even a simulation with say, friction (which would be simulating physics). It's literally sample code from PhysX fifteen years ago, where if you're standing on a physics object, your speed = physics object's speed, at every simulation frame.
They've been granted a patent on code so simple a CS grad with a game dev specialisation writes for class.
> Some of them are specific to Link’s latest adventure, including things like Riju’s lightning ability, which lets the player target enemies with a bow and bring down a lighting strike wherever the arrow lands.
To be quite blunt, the sages' abilities are implemented absolutely horribly in this game, doubly so when compared to the similar system in BotW (which was excellent). The only ability that is actually usable (and only really outside of combat) is Tulin's gust of wind; everything else is a struggle to make useful.
You have to walk up to a sage (they keep running around trying to fight enemies; and they all have an identical color palette; so it's super awkward and error-prone), press a button, and only then you get to make use of the ability. The more sages you summon, the bigger the crowd, the bigger the problem. Even the one sage that does not appear as a ghost still has a broadly similar palette (and on top of that, identical to a class of enemies). Compare with BotW, where you also get broadly similar abilities, but using each one was a decision you could execute in a split second using a dedicated key combo/mechanic, and all of them were directly viable in combat.
If Nintendo were to hold a patent on this bullshit and thusly prevent it from being implemented in any other game, they'd do the gamers a favour.
> Who knows if these patents actually go anywhere? But when game design concepts are gatekept like this, it only leads to a loss of innovation for other devs.
True! There's plenty of prior art for the remaining patents, so I sincerely doubt a lot of this would hold up in court. But the fact that this makes news at all is just proof of how rotten the system is; the patent doesn't have to be standing on a firm ground before it can successfully deter from climbing the shoulders of giants, which is foundational to innovation.
Nintendo has always been famous for pushing innovative gameplay, rather than endlessly refining the graphics on yet-another "next-gen" console that has all the same last year's titles in a new package. Whatever patents they can hold, I don't think it would help them: patents only help entrench your current position; Nintendo was always about moving forward.
I agree 100%. I loved the game, but I don't understand how anyone at Nintendo thought that these mechanics were a good idea. To make matters even worse, the button is the same to pick up an item. I can't count how many times I was about to pick up an item, and a sage passed by, hijacking the button (especially disruptive when it's Mineru).
Imo the game kind of feels thrown together in general. I think the worst part is that they traded the open feeling of adventure in the original game, which felt quite lean on mechanics and different things to do, for a much more common open world style of gameplay. Now it feels like any other checkbox open world game, a huge list of things to do and going through them one by one. BotW never felt like that
I phrase it like that because I'm about 160 hours in to ToTK right now and just last night I found something that would have made me fantastically wealthy the whole way through if I had known about it. Now it doesn't matter.
Go to the Jungle Stable, do the thing with the animals. Feed them. Come back later. Repeat constantly.
The fact that you can dismiss the sages through a hastily bolted on menu interaction tells you that they knew it was annoying. If it worked well you'd never need to.
And they moved them to interactions next to the sages because they sincerely overloaded the controls of that game.
The whole game would have been better without any sages’ power.
I wonder if there's "real life" of such patent (i.e. patent a process or method to ensure it is never used because it's so bad).
(as for the example illustrated: I absolutely agree that it is a terrible game mechanic that's doubly infuriating since the previous game had a perfectly serviceable system)
Next great investment opportunity: Raise money to get the laws changed / bribe some judges into deciding that broad storylines can be patented, then patent "boy meets girl" etc, and start extorting Hollywood for chunks of their revenue stream.
Probably best to sell the idea to those big "IP conglomeration" first; they'd invest early in exchange for a share of the extorted revenue stream later, I'm sure. Fits right into their business model.
To move into the music industry, we might patent the idea of "notes" and thereby gain royalties on all extant music... certainly any future music, what with "prior art" and all...
But arranging tones in families by resonances and using that system to make a written representation of tones for the purposes of later independent reproduction of the sequence of sound? That's a patent-able idea, at least as much as "Method and arrangement for data compression according to the LZ77 algorithm"
Copyright doesn't cover specific plot structure either. Compare The Sword of Shannara to The Fellowship of the Ring.
You can make a page-for-page copy of a book with the names changed and you're fine as far as copyright goes.
This is a myth, and even if it were true, the small-time inventor in that scenario is just as much of a barrier to human progress as the large corporation that will inevitably gate-keep the invention and extract every drop of profit they can from it for as long as legally possible.
Patents are just a way to kneecap you and all countries allied with you when compared with countries that don't honor those patents.
The same goes for IP in general, but that's a whole other can of worms...
This is why we (at least used to) have things like wide-sweeping federally funded research grants aimed at advancing science and technology in areas and ways short-sighted profit-seeking R&D can seldom touch
Not discovering a thing is almost better than someone discovering it and then patenting it, imo. It's negative progress.
That has... always... been a feature of D&D.
The TotK implementation is incredibly awkward, just like every other part of the TotK interface. None of the mechanics work well. ("Want to use an item in combat? Just pause for twenty seconds while you d-pad your way through a list of everything in your inventory!") No one would seek to copy a mechanic from TotK.
I wouldn't be too sure... Plenty of copycats around, that will even copy the less than ideal bits of the game, because it's still part of the overall experience.
Example: Soulslike games don't have a map or quest markers. It would be a good quality of life addition, but pretty much none of the Soulslike clones add quest markers.
I'd argue that, going beyond the heroic fantasy setting, laser-painting a target to rain some Hellfire has been a thing since forever and a half, and is essentially the same core mechanics.
I'd also argue that Nintendo is perfectly aware of that, it doesn't take them much energy to put out some patent submissions out there, some may pass, and then it's a deterrence-by-litigation game: if you don't have deep pockets then you'd better stay clear or risk being sued to oblivion should Nintendo feel like challenging you (irrespective of whether the patents hold any water)
This is such a common trope that the Muppets even parodied it: https://youtu.be/yIQKVITyaMI
Honorable mention for MTV UK who had "Ad-Break Pong" on the old "red button" interactive TV which let you play pong on top of commercials.
Lootbox patents:
https://patents.google.com/patent/US9744446B2/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/US9666026B1/en?oq=US966602...
https://patents.google.com/patent/US9789406B2/en
Trading card patents:
For example, Magic: The Gathering has a patent here on the gameplay process: https://patents.google.com/patent/US5662332A/en
TOTK has at least half a billion in sales, they don't need to try to extract any more money through patents.
Who benefits from this? Certainly not consumers, doubtful even Nintendo.
The whole thing about culture is copying and adapting things which have been done before. Video games would suck if innovation could only happen once every twenty years.
So many other things are way behind because innovation is blocked behind paywalls.
I can't articulate exactly what it should be, but patents need to be a whole lot more narrow in allowable scope and duration.
And organizations patenting things which wouldn't actually threaten their products or market position should be shamed.
Potentially smaller game development studios.
It's fairly commonplace in Japan for a bigger company in an industry to file, hold, and defend patents with their better funded legal departments so that the industry at large can use them without fear of patent trolls or wanton infringers.
I am, of course, being fairly generous here.
Yeah but it killed lots of good will. Lots of people realized TotK is basically BOTW1.5 and BOTW wasnt all that great.
I theorize that TotK will have been the high point of sales for the series, and future Zelda games will not quite get so high. They had marketing + fanboys echoing, I think a lot of the fanboys were disappointed.
It's pretty obvious that large corporations will only make money via producing actual value if they have absolutely no other choice. Give them the possibility of making money without having to actually produce anything, via corruption, rent-seeking, bullying, monopolies, and the like, and they absolutely will do that instead (or at the very least, in addition).
(Commentary on a different source, 1 week ago)
More discussion a week ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37062820
What do they have in common? A bright fantasy setting with a large, more or less seamless territory to explore. That's not super-novel; it's sort of what we'd expect to see as table stakes on a fantasy game once we got computers big enough to maintain a large and busy world model.
I tend to think of Zelda games in terms of puzzles and item accumulation-- a major feature is always "when you get the item from Dungeon A, it unlocks the ability to finish that dungeon, and usually grants access to some previously unreachable part of the map to proceed to Dungeon B." By comparison, Genshin's puzzles are pretty anemic and highly optional.
I think their success is 33% an excellent UI (you have great flexibility in build and playstyle, but it doesn't require a bunch of complex gestures and keybinds) and 33% in providing a pretty environment to explore, and 33% Waifu Wars.
They have a lot more in common than that. Not to say that Genshin Impact isn't doing it's own thing, but there's clear inspiration in a lot of the mechanics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TgLtAF7F_H8
If you're not sure, then why would you care?
Also, the story here is talking about Japanese patents. I have no idea if game mechanics are patentable there.
and when you patent something you have to sign that you did proper research and found that there is priority art etc.
parents aren't a first tries to patent it wins system, but first tries to patent something which isn't publicly available/known wins system
can we pleas start hugely penalizing companies for blandly deceiving the patent office, i.e. doing what I would say is systematic fraud
(and no longer make the patent office have the number of patents they grant being a positive/desired metric, too)