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Comment by loupol | Hacker News Reader

This feels like an extremely dangerous slippery slope. The more patents on gameplay are granted, the more they'll be applied for by big companies who will eventually end up with big patent portfolios they can use to shut down other games from reusing cool mechanics, whether from big companies or indie studios.

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].

[0] https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/24/rent-to-pwn/

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Great link. Another classic on patents as rent-seeking: http://www.dklevine.com/general/intellectual/againstnew.htm

> 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.

I hate that loading screen mini games was patented for many years. It’s a cultural theft orchestrated by govt like a crime racket, not an investment into innovation

That patent expired a couple years ago IIRC, but I still haven't been seeing any loading minigames. Are games starting to do them yet?

It makes alot less sense now with SSD's being as fast as they are largely llimiting how long a loading screen will be.

It's funny when you play older games with things on the loading screen you only see them for a split second nowadays.

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.

You can still hit a button to stop the loading from finishing, IIRC, and then just hang around on the combo practice screen as long as you like.

If you can consider it a minigame, when you are skydiving down into the depths and the music and atmosphere changes in TOTK... that's a loading screen.

Are loading times still a thing with new consoles? I don't own last gen consoles but I remember them making a big fuss about it.

It doesn’t matter anymore

That patent has expired.

It was also an obviously invalid patent, as prior art existed from 1988:

<https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Fast_loader&oldid...>

Anyone can think of it and invent it independently, but you’d have been put in a cage if you acted on your original thought because someone else paid the protection money earlier

You won't be put in a cage if you violate a patent. There are no criminal penalties for patent violations.

The threat is there if you don’t pay the damages. It all comes back to cages. Without the cage there is no damages payment, without the threat of damages payment there is no patent.

Do you actually know of a case where someone went to jail because they failed to pay damages in a patent case? I don't think that is how it works. If you don't pay what you owe then the court will order your wages garnished and your property confiscated. And I guess if you intentionally interfere with either of those things you could end up in jail for violating a court order.

It’s that last bit that’s the kicker. IANAL, but if you blatantly refuse a court order, they can put you in a cage.

> There are no criminal penalties for patent violations.

You might be made permanently destitute and homeless however.

You'd have to prove it in court, which means you'd have to outspend Namco Bandai on lawyers. Water under the bridge now, but still.

In USA and UK, AIUI, you can submit prior art without being involved (in UK you can do it anonymously; someone is looking at using an AI system to do this automatically!). Importantly there is a limited window of time for such submissions. In USA it's called Third Party Pre-issuance Submissions, 35 USC 122; https://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/pac/mpep/s1134.html. In UK it's called Third-Party Observations (Patents Act S.21). IIRC, WIPO and EPO have these too, I imagine it's common to all/most patent systems.

Proving prior art is often should be as simple as presenting an obvious proof and have the patent invalidated in the same day as long as the records are not debatable.

What you're talking about almost exists, it's called an inter partes review[0]. The problem is, the records are almost always debatable. The legal system affords scoundrels plenty of opportunities to file paperwork.

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...

Don't forget the patents on CONTROLLERS VIBRATING for fucks sake. The reason the original PS3 controller didn't have vibration was because sony wanted to avoid paying the protection racket one time.

As if making something buzz is fucking "non-obvious"

Didnt dildos get there first?

It’s only invalid if you the have the cash to fight an expensive court battle.

Still didn't prevent us from taking a wide berth around the idea when I was working on my first title in the industry. The studio was aware of the patent and wasn't willing to take on any risk.

What you're describing already happened twenty years ago. Konami patented beatmania's keysounding[0] and DDR[1]'s control scheme and effectively had veto rights on competing rhythm games for decades. And they enforced those rights very strictly:

- 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.

Grew up on DDR back in the early 2000s as part of my workouts. Loved it immensely but when ITG came out, switched over immediately. I understand why Konami did what they did although I wished they didn't, because it killed the genre. ITG had better UI/UX, better tracks, better graphics, and equally important - better content. I was good enough that 10-footers like Max300 and Legend of MaxX were not cutting it, so when ITG came out and tracks like Vertex and Vertex^2 had a 12 foot rating, the game was really challenging. What wasn't to like?

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.

I would highly recommend checking out Zenius-i-vanisher's arcade search[0], you might have a local operator with something worth playing. Even if it's just StepManiaX. Actually, SMX is pretty cool on its own, I shouldn't talk about it like it's the red-headed stepchild of dance games.

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.

[0] https://zenius-i-vanisher.com/v5.2/arcades.php

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ8DPAD2zCs

fun addendum: StepmaniaX doesn't have note receptors because konami's patents for DDR are so broad that the idea of notes scrolling towards a visible note outline is something they can sue you for.

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.

Ouch!

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.

What’s the significance of 0? Is it just playing a sound on the key press?

Is it something more nuanced like playing the sound on the press without waiting for the next frame to tick?

Yes, keysounding in beatmania is literally just playing a sound when you press a key.

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.

Do you have a source on that being the reason? I'm extremely curious. The amount of work it takes to keysound a track (and figure out hot to not make it awkward at lower difficulty levels) seems like a much more reasonable reason not to do it, especially since there is some evidence[0] that Konami and Activision might have struck a deal for patent access, and even ended up collaborating to manufacture and distribute Guitar Hero Arcade.

[0]: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/pc/exclusive-exploring-i-guita...

I don't have hard sources on Harmonix keysounding and may have misremembered things[0], or this might just be community misinformation. The article you are linking to concerns Guitar Hero III, which was made by Neversoft after Activision bought RedOctane without Harmonix. At that point they had enough money to pay for patent licenses. The amount of money being spent on guitar games in the US was utterly insane at this point (and part of the reason why they died off so quickly).

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.

It's just playing a sound on the keypress, but each note in the song has an individual sound assigned to it that matches the song. In Beatmania iirc, the sound assigned to each note is the section of the song itself, meaning if you miss a note, the song stops playing until you hit a correct note.

It's not just if you miss a note, the song stops playing. If you're off on your timing, the song plays off. If you press the wrong button, the wrong part of the song plays. All of this is immediate and obvious audio feedback that you don't really get from other rhythm games, because all the workarounds for beatmania keysounding can't do this.

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.

Hey, this was a fascinating read. Thanks for sharing it.

I agree this is not good!

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.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slippery_slope

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snowballing

I tend to argue that “slippery slope” is not actually a logical fallacy the way others (e.g. straw man) are.

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.

Like any logical fallacy, the slippery slope is about the general validity of a logical inference - and not about the truth of its conclusion.

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.

The recognition of the phrase as a logical fallacy comes after the phrase starts to be widely used, not the other way around. If everyone starts saying "snowball out of control", then eventually the fallacy will be known as "snowball out of control" fallacy instead.

> owning and extracting rent on things rather than actually producing them

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.

Yup, that's the whole point of patent. To be able to "own" ideas, so nobody else can compete.

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.

It's also a "prisoner's dilemma" that involves playing against every other company on the planet.

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.

The dynamics at play at play are definitely similar, but not completely so.

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.

Patents are terrible. They don't provide any real protection since you still have to litigate and they don't provide innovation. They are greed tools for evil people to use to stop other people from using a part of our rights.

> Yup, that's the whole point of patent. To be able to "own" ideas, so nobody else can compete.

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.

The irony is that patents exist to limit your private property rights. You worked hard and made your own game but it violates a broad patent and now you're being sued? Private property is sacred!

Patents exist to protect small inventors from large companies. If I spend years of my personal time inventing something and I patent it it prevents another larger company from using their existing infrastructure to ramp up way faster on my idea.

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.

The original motivation for patents was for people to publish their methods so they didn't get monopolised indefinitely or lost. Any bias towards larger or smaller inventors was incidental (and I would say patents work far more against smaller players than for them: if you're a new entry to the market with a new patented innovation, what's your option to actually make anything with that patent considering all the incumbents have plenty that you probably need to compete at all?)

> Patents exist to protect small inventors from large companies. If I spend years of my personal time inventing something and I patent it it prevents another larger company from using their existing infrastructure to ramp up way faster on my idea.

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.

> 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.

Patents are often framed as something that protects the small, but in reality it has been a rigged game from the start. For one thing, patent litigation is expensive and risky. It's uncertain whether a given lawsuit will be successful. And one of the risks is invalidating the patent itself, so litigators often will take a deal (and earn less than what would be owed if infringement were found)

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!

> Patents exist to protect small inventors from large companies.

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..." :)

I mean all of patent law originates from the Statue of Monopolies [1] which was literally designed to screw over small companies.

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?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_Monopolies

I don't really think either of your statements are that interesting. The first is an extreme oversimplification about England's patent system origins from literally hundreds of years ago, the second is just some sort of straw man that I don't see as being relevant.

That didn't really worked well at all for the Wright brothers, did it?

No one is claiming it works well.

Devils advocate but not sure how not allowing reusing mechanics leads to killing off novelty. If anything not allowing resuing mechanics should lead to developers being forced to invent new non cookie cutter mechanics to get around the patent.

It prevents new games from coming up with novel application/combinations of these mechanics.

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.

The example I go to is the Nemesis system of the Mordor games. Such a cool system for that type of game, and it's easy to imagine ways to use it in a ton of similar games.

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.

I'm not sure if even that Nemesis system is really something completely new. You could probably get a similar emergent behaviour from older systems like goal-oriented action planning, and I wouldn't be surprised if games like Dwarf Fortress already had something similar.

That's probably true, but the specific implementation in the Mordor games is pretty unique. It's not just emergent gameplay, there's elements of deliberate action in there. The game selects certain enemies to become "resurrected" to come back stronger and become your longterm rivals.

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.

One of the techniques when you file a patent is to come up with as many variations of an idea as possible. You don't even need to have built those ideas into an implementation. So maybe I say "This patent is for playing a sound right when a button is pressed" but I expand it to "and right before and right after, based on some cadence, or a configuration", etc etc etc. This makes patents both precise and very broad, leaving little room for someone to go "ah but I did it differently".

Couldn’t this be fixed by requiring an implementation to patent?

I think that would have its own issues, such as creating a significant burden on both the person filing (who the system is designed to protect) as well as the patent office having to verify the implementation. I think it would be very complex.

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.

No, because one of the traditional use-cases why patents were made is so that an inventor of a novel solution can get investment to get that invention actually implemented without risking that the investors will just steal the invention; or that the inventor can contract a manufacturing company to make the prototype without risking that they will just include the invention in their own products.

So being able to secure a patent before its first implementation is made is pretty much a non-negotiable requirement.

Patents are often not directly exploited by the holder; instead, the holder sits and waits decfor someone else to build a working tool, then sues.

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.

It seems to make sense, but is problematic in practice - for example, for pharmaceuticals it might take half of the total patent time until you are able to sell a product based on the patent, as getting FDA approval could take something like 8 years if they ask for more trials.

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.

It could also be fixed by making the penalty for filing an invalid patent prohibitively high. If someone proves prior art, you have to pay them "a mountain of cash". That way, there's A) a real risk in making your patent any broader than it needs to be and B) an incentive for law firms specialize in killing patents for the reward payout.

That's going to make it way easier for large companies who can afford a team of lawyers to hunt through potential infringements (and defend them). The cost of filing a patent is already really high (1000s, 10s of thosands) even without that.

A game consists of many mechanics combined. A great game needs all of them to work and licensing deals have very high transaction costs. You also have game mechanics that only work in the presence of other game mechanics, so patenting these can actually _decrease_ novel game mechanics.

No game mechanic in Minecraft, Dark Souls, Baldur's Gate 3, etc is new. Their success comes from a well-executed mix of known features. Trying to create a game with a new mechanic is like writing a story with an unknown plot device: theoretically possible but quite difficult and the result likely won't be any better in terms of quality.

Try and name just one game released in the last decade with a completely novel game mechanic.

Then I doubt you would approve as a novel game mechanic anything that Nintendo attempts to patent within that claim. An exemplary new mechanic recent decade game is Baba Is You. It isn't obvious. If it was, someone would come up with Baba Is You pretty soon after Sokoban was made 40 years ago.

I also don't think nintendo should be granted the patents it is seeking, other games have done similar enough before that it feels wrong to give it to the bigger company because they asked.

Oh, Baba Is You is a good example, I'd say that counts.

"flOw" certainly seemed novel (and really nice) when it was released back in 2006 (not the last decade, obviously):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTVDSOnPLns

It's a pity nothing else since seems to use the same mechanic / concept.

Well written.

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