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.
- 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.