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].
> 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
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.
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.
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
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.
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].
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"
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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?
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.
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".
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.
I have to say that I hate that Nintendo makes great games, because the company is awful. They are very controlling (ex: you can only play on their hardware), very litigious, create trouble with legal things like emulation and overall aren't pleasant.
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.
Yeah, Nintendo is an awful company. Unlike some other awful game companies, at least they create pretty good games.
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).
Your partner needs to change the home console on their account to the one you play on. Then you'll be able to play with different accounts.
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
I don’t disagree with the sentiment but you’re straight wrong on the need to buy multiple copies of a game to play on different profiles on a single switch.
This is wrong - Nintendo allows people who are using the same switch to play each other's games that are downloaded to the switch. It's not even labeled anywhere which account that game belongs to. My husband an I pay each other's digital purchases all the time.
They can be downloaded to a switch and once they are on the switch an account playing that switch can play any digital games on the switch. They don't even tell you which account "owns" the game.
Well you have some odd settings. My nieces and nephews can download and play games on their switch hundreds of miles away from me using my profile. Whenever I get a new game they are excited because now they have that game as well as long as they use my profile on their account.
Nintendo does a lot of stupid shit but this is one of the few things I think they have been really good about.
Great games, maybe. Repetitive use of same IP over 30+ years, 100%. Its like Fast N Furious or other movie franchises that just publish a slightly different version on some cadence. If you really like it, then yes those would be great games for you.
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.
You say the games don't change significantly, then you say the games have changed in a way you don't like.
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 get tired of the same story being repeated, maybe I could have worded it better - thats the part that they just recycle all the time. Yeah they aren’t releasing new games on a yearly basis but when they do its the same characters and nearly the same story lines. BoTW is about rescuing the princess, so is the orig Zelda. Yes there are different mini-boss fights, puzzles, etc. and they can be fun but its certainly not a new original story.
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
I’m not asking for anything, Nintendo is going to do whatever they want with their video game art form. I’m just commenting that I’ve found for most video games with story elements I don’t like repeat/rehashing a story. For whatever reason I’m ok with that sometimes in movies. I got through most of BoTW but just can’t pick it back up to finish, so I don’t.
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.
I disagree with everything you said, lol. Besides the original NEW Zelda being fun.
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.
I think a lot of what makes the games special is the level of polish vs other studios. Polish takes a lot of time, which is why most studios don’t do it to the degree Nintendo seems to.
I think that helps a ton, but they also focus obssessively on gameplay. Story, graphics, cinematics, etc. take a backseat. Multiplayer rarely exists at all.
> Repetitive use of same IP over 30+ years, 100%. Its like Fast N Furious or other movie franchises that just publish a slightly different version on some cadence.
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.
Couldn't disagree more with the first 2 paragraphs. It feels like saying Apple publishes a slightly different version of its iPhone every year. I think you will find plenty of differences - even major ones between the first iPhone and the latest one. Same thing with Nintendo games. IMHO, Nintendo is probably the best developer in the world and have proven this again and again.
Completely agree with your last paragraph though.
They do make great games and have a very controlling ecosystem, which honestly I have no problem with - it's their IP and they can do what they want with it. Much like Apple, their integration with hardware is quite tight and their first-party content is usually really well done. Miles better than the first-party outputs from Sony or Nintendo.
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.
"Nintendo games actually suck, you are just too much a {dummy,shill,fanboi} to realize it!"
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.
"Nintendo gamers" aren't really a thing, unless you're a kid with only one console.
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.
> 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.
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.
>> 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.
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.
There needs to be penalty for filing patents that are utter shit. At the very minimum, trying to actually enforce such patents should constitute abuse of process or malicious prosecution.
Context: I've nearly 100%'d BotW(+DLC)+TotK (except for the Korok seeds). Spoilers might follow.
> 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.
> To be quite blunt, the sages' abilities are implemented absolutely horribly in this game
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).
Don't forget that you use e.g. the lightning strike ability as a long range attack, yet the avatar you have to interact with tends to aggressively charge directly into close range. I gave up using the lightning ability because I just get hit if I run close enough while awkwardly fumbling around until I find the magic spot to press the A button.
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.
The worst part is that you get the only useful one first if you go where the game obviously prods you to (north west), setting the expectation that all the abilities would be useful. Unfortunately they are so bad it's actually comical.
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
Naturally, I picked him up last, but I thought the boulder guy had his uses. Being able to break through walls without consuming hammers was definitely a plus. Then again, the cooldown was so long that it became quite irritating to use it for demolition purposes.
Well that's better than if you got his ability last. Imagine playing 100 hours and then being like WHAT, YOU CAN DO THAT? I COULD HAVE DONE THAT THE WHOLE TIME?
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.
I've heard of quite a bunch of people who went quite far without realising you can get the paraglider. From the promo materials & the tutorial it definitely seemed like the game was meant to be played using skydiving and Zonai wings.
Jumping on the train. Companions in general are very annoying, and having four is next level annoying. I’ve run into the same issues, makes the game not fun when you go to pick items up and initiate their power. Especially when their powers have a tendency to kill the frame rate. I know you can dismiss them but since some parts of the gameplay center on their mechanics it’s very annoying. I could do without companions in an open world game.
Being hard to use and not very useful feels like a clear design choice to me. They were too good in the previous game, so they all got a big ol’ round of the nerf hammer.
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.
> 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.
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.
Copyright generally doesn't cover broad plot structure or tropes, especially components that are considered characteristic of a genre (scènes à faire). Where it gets tricky is deciding when a particular arrangement of plot points and tropes is close enough to be infringing. The lines between rip-off, homage, parody, subversion, and (sub)genre (re)invention aren't especially bright or sharp. As with many other things, how much you can get away with seems to heavily depend on industry influence/standing. I don't think too many people other than Mel Brooks could have made Spaceballs happen, for example.
Nah, that's far too limited and specific. Patents have been extended in scope somehow to cover things like "business models" and algorithms, far more abstract things. Copyright keeps being held to specific sequences of tokens and much more concrete things.
The problem there is that it's incredibily difficult to prove copyright violation / plagiarism; a recent example, there's a Tetris film on Apple TV and the author of a book is suing because they believe it lifted their story after he sent a pre-production copy to the company currently owning the Tetris brand: https://www.theguardian.com/games/2023/aug/09/the-tetris-eff...
Right, but we don't want to just "take it down"; we want to extract rent from the efforts of others by legal means.
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"
I maintain that patents are unequivocally bad across the board no matter who holds them. We like to subscribe to this myth of the "small-time inventor" being able to capitalize on their invention by requiring copycats to pay them licensing fees.
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...
One could, and one could counter with "then that is R&D done for the wrong reasons"
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.
> Automaton, a gaming website that focuses on Japanese games like Zelda, has a roundup of the 32 patents Nintendo put forth. 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.
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'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)
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.
> On top of trying to patent the tech, Nintendo seeks to patent the loading screen that shows up when the player is fast-traveling across Hyrule. This specifically refers to the screen that shows the map transition from the player’s starting point to their destination.
There's a few actually, although they don't seem to be direct "this is a lootbox" patent. That said, the concept of lootboxes goes back to things like trading cards from sealed packages, e.g. baseball cards.
Wait, aren't patents on gameplay inapplicable? I thought this is why game clones are commonplace, so much that the term "x clone" entered the vernacular for video games.
I think it's a bit of a grey area, you can't patent abstract things like rules of a game, but a game engine makes that a little less abstract and turns it into an implementation.
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.
>TOTK has at least half a billion in sales, they don't need to try to extract any more money through patents.
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.
Why wouldn't Nintendo benefit? Patents allow them to extract rent from their competitors. Just license where applicable and get $5 per sale of your competitors' games, or delay / block your competitors' games when you specifically don't like them (especially indies, who don't have the capability to fight or effectively negotiate.)
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.
This is something very Japanese, they like to patent everything to the extent I think it's something cultural. My company (Japanese owned) made us sign something on the lines that the company can patent inventions of employee without his consent.
What happens to a game developer who has never seen TOTK or these patents, who just happens to converge on the same idea, and put in their game? And what if lots of games already do the idea but just didn't patent it?
This makes 0 sense from a business perspective. Their moat is clearly in their brand, from what I've seen TotK game mechanics look frankly unoriginal and subpar
It makes 0 sense from the perspective of the business of making and selling a whole ton of great games and making oodles of money on them. It makes lots of sense from the perspective of the business of abusing a corrupt legal system to bully, coerce, and destroy small studios.
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).
OK some of these are so embarrassing that I'd expect developers worth their salt should just leave the organization producing these applications. I'd easily be able to tell my kids that the reason we don't have food on the table is because dad's manager is an idiot who forces me to help write patents for obvious prior art
The only game mechanic I want to see Nintendo patent is brawl tripping. Probably not necessary as it seems other fighting games haven't seen the brilliance of such a mechanic, but may as well play it safe in case others become enlightened.
Brawl in general was the perfect encapsulation of what is wrong with Nintendo (though tbf they have course corrected somewhat in Smash Ultimate) - Melee was a game that allowed an incredibly high skill ceiling with it's high speed and myriad advanced techniques, which birthed the biggest grassroots competitive fighting game scene ever. But Nintendo hadn't conceived of Smash as a competitive game and so they went alllll the way out of their way to shut that shit down in the next iteration. Lowered the speed of the game, made it way floatier so combos are harder, ensured there were no advanced movement techniques, and even introduced mandatory bullshit rng like the tripping mechanic.
As a Genshin player who has never played BOTW, I'll disagree.
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.
> What do they have in common? A bright fantasy setting with a large, more or less seamless territory to explore.
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
I am just saying, Kotaku is just doing this with vendetta. TotK patents were already talked about in detail in another post. Comment is only about THIS article and motivation behind it, not about the patents.
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/