Yeah well when the copyright courts agreed to Namco’s patent on loading screen minigames it kind of freaked everyone out back then and people patented every dumbshit thing. For a short time Amazon tried to patent the single click purchase
Comment on Eternal Darkness' infamous sanity system patent has expired - so can anyone now copy it?
Gibibit@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I’m not against patents in general but looking at the list of specific insanity-induced hallucinations being patented this whole thing is ridiculous. This is on the level of being able to patent giving your restaurant guests cutlery. How is any designer supposed to keep track of which specific micro events are patented like this.
Angry_Autist@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Lanusensei87@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Outside of the very specific cases of Palworld and WB’s notorious Nemesis System, you probably can just ignore the patents and do whatever you want, many of these are filed for self protection rather than to enforce them.
Metroid Zero Mission’s Mother Brain fight is patented, it literally is about shooting the player when they make line of sight with the Brain eye, besides being utterly ridiculous to have something like this patented, you don’t see anyone going to court over this.
brsrklf@jlai.lu 4 days ago
I am against all game design patents in general. You shouldn’t be able to file a patent on game mechanics, like no movie director could have filed a patent on, say, the sequence shot.
Game content (art, characters, etc) is already protected by copyright. Patents have absolutely no business in this.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 4 days ago
Wholly agreed. In general the concept that “you can’t patent an idea” or “you can’t patent a general concept” is supposed to be at the heart of patent law. I think some of these game mechanics parents, like this and the Nemesis System, go against that too much.
Xenny@lemmy.world 4 days ago
No sorry you can’t paint like that I patented left to right brush strokes.
catloaf@lemm.ee 4 days ago
If you invented a new and novel method of painting, like Jackson Pollock’s, you could potentially patent that. Directionally brushing has imperial buttloads of prior literal art.
Xenny@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Nah fuck that I should be able to splatter paint and call it my work as well.
Hudell@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 days ago
If every game had patented everything that they came up with, we probably wouldn’t have reached 1000 total games by now.
Some early game would probably patent “revealing more of the world as you move horizontally/verrically” and we would probably be confined to a single screen for every other game for decade.
Then some other game would patent “using an input source to move a gun’s aim/targetting on the screen” and we would never have had any fps. A “first person view” would probably be patented soon too. Leveling up? What a cool concept that I wish more than one game ever used.
At best, companies would all be paying licenses to each other for all of those mechanics - just like it works on hardware today where Samsung (for example) for a long time made a ton of money out of their main competitor’s sales. And games would probably be so expensive that a lot of them could even have their own dedicated hardware made specifically for them, without affecting the final price that much.
Modern day Nintendo would surely enjoy that. They could make gimmicky hardware for specific games and simply call it a toy. Games like Guitar Hero would probably only be playable on toy guitars (as some other game would’ve already patented translating basic inputs into something rhythm related).
In a way I could see some pretty cool games being invented for a while in this parallel reality, with the patent restrictions forcing people to think of new stuff like the hardware restrictions used to do last century - but we would never had Stardew Valley, Minecraft, Rimworld, Factorio, Dwarf Fortress and 99% of the most beloved games out there.
Angry_Autist@lemmy.world 4 days ago
Sure we all agree but the dumbshits making the rules 1) Have no idea about technology older than color television and 2) Are really only interested in preserving corporate profitability