The three patents—all filed in Japan between May and July 2024—draw similarities between Palworld and 2022’s 2022’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus specifically. Their descriptions concern game mechanics like “riding an object” or throwing a ball to capture and possess a character in virtual spaces.
Wait…so the patents didn’t even exist when Palworld was released into EA? or am I missing something?
You’re not, but there’s a preexisting patent, and these three are basically extensions of that patent.
Essentially, Palworld needed to know what supplementary patents Nintendo was going to file in the future in Japan so they didn’t run afoul of the patent from the past. You know, textbook legal psychic stuff, really. /s
I hope Nintendo hurts itself in its confusion as its lawyers flail before the Japanese courts.
Counterpoint: both of those ideas being patented meant no competitor could use them while the ideas were relevant. And in both cases, the patenting company made like one promising example of the patented idea and then barely used it after that. Wouldn’t it have been better for consumers if we could have had loading screen minigames back when long loading screens were still relevant?
it’s like the first person invent a way to make the pop cap for your travel coffee mug. Like, anyone could have come up with that idea, right? compare to screw cap we used to have. We do have plenty of examples where the patent aren’t really popular until after it is expired or irrelevant.
Like, yeah, in a heatlhy competition env, it is way better for consumer in the beginning. But because of how capital works, eventually without patent it all goes to the bigger corps.
For the consumer, obviously.
Patents exist to protect the profit of the inventor, specifically because once you have spent the RnD money to make something, someone else can take your finished idea and create your thing without having to cover those costs. Their entire point is to make sure stuff stays more expensive and exclusive for longer.
But the issue isn’t that patents or even software patents exist as a thing, they are important to protect against copying, it’s that seemingly almost anything no matter how simple, vague or universal it is can apply and get patented, and whoever owns those patents then doesn’t have to use or license them, instead they just sit on them waiting to strike with a lawsuit.
I think software patents should really only apply to extremely tricky algorithmic “discoveries” (which I would consider inventions, as someone that’s written a SHA256 implementation from reference material, nobody is “just coming up with that”).
“Ingenuity patents” like that loading screen game are everything that’s wrong with software patents. It’s not all that crazy of an idea to add a game while waiting to play the main game. There’s no radical research required there, just an idea.
I don’t think vague ideas like “a game in a loading screen” are sufficiently creative to warrant a patent.
The thing is, many physical patents are also describing extremely simple mechanisms or mere ideas for them. I don’t think your criteria reflect reality, as much as I wish they did.
for practical physical good, some times a patent just means I did this first doesn’t mean it’s hard to do or replicate. ie. like the umbrella wedge/spring to make it open automatically. That’s the part of ingenuity. And why I think the mini game during loading screen worth the patent.
I don’t like algorithm patent because ultimately, it was there, if original sha hash wasn’t developed, someone would come up with a different method that doing roughly the same. It’s the math and other prior foundation in computer hasing/data processing provides the idea and how you can process and get the hash fast. so your newer arrangement of faster version(like different sorting algorithm) would not be possible without those other research.
ie. for my own example, my thesis involves doing polygon culling strategy, my base algorithm is totally base on math prediction as to what’s the optimum I can achieve minimum culling checks. BUT, that algorithm is actually slower than when you implement the checks base on how GPU is doing the render plus cache efficiency. If I did not know or not aware how computer works from prior study, I can’t figure out why my “optimum” algorithm is actually slower than sub-optimum checking strategy.
Say, what if SHA or whatever algorithms is implemented, and is actually very impactful to other application, which can be proven that anyone can naturally come to this conclusion by doing their own research, simply grant that patent impedes future development. Another computer graphic patent is the Joe Alter hair distribution, it has nothing to do with ingenuity and just because his dad is a good patent lawyer, it blocks any healthy competition from selling CG hair grooming product in US. If you check the patent itself, that was like trying to patent a math distribution over surface.
like the umbrella wedge/spring to make it open automatically.
That to me is a very specific algorithm. It’s a simple mechanism but putting it together might be a bit tricky.
That’s very similar to SHA, it’s a fairly simple set of mechanisms but the actual composure of those ideas into something that works as well as SHA does takes very specific research experience. It’s not at all an abstract idea, it’s a very concrete and specific set of operations that you invented first.
Imagine if the patent was “an umbrella can open itself with the push of button” no further details. That’s close to the level of detail some software patents are argued at and effectively what the “put a game in your loading screen” patent was awarded on.
You can’t patent the idea that “an umbrella should be able to open [somehow]” so I likewise think it’s ridiculous that someone was able to parent “your game [somehow] runs another simpler game before it runs.”
Patents should be to protect very specific research so that the private sector can do said research and profit from it. Patents should not block out broad concepts. The patent in the video game situation was and should’ve been ruled as bogus. It’s not the type of thing anyone needed to research or think about, you just literally go “what if I added a game to my loading screen” and you’re in violation.
The Namco(which I wrongly attribute to Konami) thing “is” very specific. Remember during that time there are not a lot multi core processors. It requires clever scheduling to allow running both the mini-game AND checking loading status to seamlessly transition into game. It’s really not just a simple “concept” but ingenuity to arrange your loading I/O wait time into running their past game at the same time. That’s in PS1 era where loading wait time because of CD-ROM and later DVD was very significant.
Algorithmic patents amount to patenting maths which, by very longstanding precedence, is not a thing, for good reason.
In the EU there’s only one way to patent software and that’s if you’re using it to achieve direct physical ends. E.g. you can patent washing machine firmware in so far as you patent a particular way to combine sensor data to achieve a particular washing result. Rule of thumb: If, 30 years ago, you’d have an electromechanical mechanism to do the task then you can patent the software that’s now replacing it.
Oh: It’s also possible to patent silicon, that is, you can patent your hardware acceleration methods for video decoding. That doesn’t extend to decoders running on general-purpose hardware, though.
If you want to monopolise your brand-new hash algorithm there’s a simple way: Don’t publish the source, use copyright to collect royalties… though that doesn’t mean that reverse engineering is outlawed, especially if necessary for interoperability. Practically speaking nope hash algorithms just can’t be protected which is fair and square because it’s academia who comes up with that kind of stuff and we paid for it with taxpayer money. Want to make money off it? Get tenure.
The problem is a hash algorithm is exactly the sort of thing that copyright would be horrible at protecting. The source code is hardly relevant at all, it’s the operations that matter.
A big part of patents is to allow private sector research to occur. RCA failed and maybe patents should just fail too.
The three patents—all filed in Japan between May and July 2024—draw similarities between Palworld and 2022’s 2022’s Pokémon Legends: Arceus specifically. Their descriptions concern game mechanics like “riding an object” or throwing a ball to capture and possess a character in virtual spaces.
the Entertainment Software Association (ESA) which claimed preservation supporters like the VGHF “[did] not propose a clear requirement to know who the users are or why they want to access a game.” Likewise, it suggested those lack of requirements meant supporters aimed to “reserve almost complete discretion in how they would provide access to preserve[d] games.”
Stingy. You fucks don’t make money with it anymore.
I can see why the ESA would want to defend IP but it should sadden everyone that they’re basically taking thousands upon thousands of titles of abandonware hostage in order to protect a couple hundred that might possibly have some value on the Playstation or Nintendo store or as a bundle on PC at some point in the future.
I used to download abandonware from the mid 80s, monochrome CRPG type stuff, back in the late 90s. Kinda bummed that most of them are probably just gone at this point. CRPG and blobbers, bygone era.
Shame on the Entertainment Software Association, not giving a damn about software.
There’s a lot that just vanish into the ether when someone doesn’t renew their little abandonware site they built and forgot about a decade ago. Maybe not the big names like Might & Magic, but the smaller titles most people have never heard of. Shit’s a bummer if the Internet Archive doesn’t get to it because then it probably only exists on a dozen 3.5" floppys in random desks that haven’t been cleaned out
copyright and all of intellectual property was meant to “promote the progress of science and useful arts”—it has since eroded it and held it up for ownership by capitalists public domain was originally 14 years after publication. 14 years ago was 2010—imagine if everything before 2010 was in the public domain. All video games. All movies. All books, songs, etc. How much of our culture could be preserved? Compare that to now. How much of what you imagined is owned by a corporation? Managed by shareholders? Has the commons been fostered, or has it been divided into fiefdoms?
When preserving culture is criminal, or punishable, ya might want to reevaluate your laws
In the meantime, people are gonna do it anyway 'cause why ask permission to back up and preserve your own stuff? And when the law finally catches up, some will be grateful to those that did so despite the earlier wrongful laws that tried to discourage them.
Probably depends on the game. I’m pretty sure more popular games or games with a sizable amount of dedicated fans, like the TF2 community, have probably already found a way to make their own private servers or at least are working on it.
When preserving culture is criminal, or punishable, ya might want to reevaluate your laws
Or, don’t treat it like culture but slop to be consumed and discarded. If law is not there, put pressure on publishers to release games under licensing that allows preservation after predetermined amount of time. Maybe make slop ineligible for game awards and remove it from review aggregators. There are ways I’m sure.
…Who am I kidding, nobody is going to do because it would require too much cooperation and people are selfish.
Arguing that game perservation is cultural preservation gets messy.
Let’s use a somewhat recent example: Overwatch. A lot of us LOVED Overwatch during the first few years. Then there were enough changes to balance out teams for competitive play that a lot of us feel it is no longer the same game and bounced off of it. Similarly, Darkest Dungeon 1 was kind of infamous for some major balance changes during early access that proved the true horror was gamers.
What is the answer there? Is it to back up every single version of every single game? Ha! You’ve fallen for my trap card! (also, remember when yu-gi-oh wasn’t a game where it is about building a deck so you can turn one wipe the other player?).
Because youtubers like Josh Strife Hayes who specialize in MMOs and multiplayer games have talked about this to varying degrees. Josh can play a really interesting MMO where he is literally the only person online for most of his recording session. But… that means he can only talk about the mechanics of the MMO and can’t really talk about progression or what it was like to play.
And that extends to “normal” games. There was a time when EVERYONE who was playing Tunic (and La-Mulana before it) was in chat rooms and message boards trying to understand the secrets. And countless video game essayists will acknowledge this. That coming back to a game in 2024 is very much about trying to understand what the game was in 2004. Hell, Illusory Wall has done some great videos where he actually researches this and points out how many misconceptions people have about what the players of Dark Souls 1 were doing which… is amazing.
Which gets back to preservation of culture. Shakespeare’s works are undeniably influential. But what is preservation? Is it the script? Is it the 1968 film where we all saw some boobies? Probably not, but that is what we see in high school. Is it the 199t movie with a Sword 9mm? I actually have a lot of arguments for why it should be but…
Because also? Most of what people learn about Shakespeare completely ignores the… for lack of a more humorous term, cultural aspects of it. Almost everything that man (allegedly?) wrote was a commentary on politics of the day. And you can read an annotated copy that will add in these references Pop Up Video style (remember that?) but that still lacks the meaning of the dimwitted young actor playing Juliet who doesn’t realize and the veteran playing Mercutio who is keeping an eye on the audience and is ready to bolt if people get angry or some cops show up and decide it is too on the nose and go to beat on Billy S.
But also? Who is to say that is any less culturally important than a 10th grade Brit Lit class putting on a performance where Tybalt both decided it would be funny to pretend he is Keanu in Bill and Ted AND spent all night playing Tribes and never memorized his lines so he is just over-emoting while trying to read off a bunch of cue cards in his sleeve? And the class is equal parts amused and pissed off while the teacher takes sips from a flask because this is the third class that day who did something stupid.
And, going back to games: Who is to say that playing Dark Souls by yourself is any less culturally relevant than watching the influencers of the day lose their shit and get mad at chat because they can’t beat Ornstein and Smough?
Because media is not in a vacuum. Media’s impact on culture is informed by the people who consume it.
Which is why I increasingly think that, from a game and cultural preservation standpoint, youtube and twitch and the blogs of the day are actually MUCH more important to preserve.
I mean, that all sounds to me like a really good argument for preserving copies of every single version of every game. To go back to your Shakespeare example, it would be a massive loss if any of those adaptations were not preserved to be found by those who went looking, so all we had to go on was records of people talking about them. In fact, there are at least a few examples of exactly that: Homer’s Illiad and Odyssey are only parts of a much larger series which we only know exist because we have other records discussing it.
Yeah, just taking snapshots of everything isn’t going to let you perfectly recreate the culture surrounding a game at any point in time, but having those snapshots around is important for giving context to other records you have.
But how feasible is it to have a recording of every single time any high school brit lit class put on Shakespear? Uhm… okay, the NSA got you covered but you get my point.
But, again, is a copy of the state of WoW on October 25th 2024 all that important when you consider that what really matter are the players and… I dunno, I guess they are talking about the expensive mounts?
Which gets back to the argument of preserving the games themselves (which I think has a lot of merit) versus preserving the culture around them. And people tend to conflate the two because they think “we are preserving culture” gives them a stronger argument.
But how feasible is it to have a recording of every single time any high school brit lit class put on Shakespear?
significantly less so than video games, which are digital files that are at least for a while all stored on a companies servers
But, again, is a copy of the state of WoW on October 25th 2024 all that important when you consider that what really matter are the players
You wouldn’t be copying a specific date, you’d be copying a game version. Opinions on how granular it should go vary, but in a game like FFXIV for example I’d say every major number patch. I’d quote like to go back and remember how things looked, felt, and we’re back then even without the players, which are the least important part of preserving that game world to me
Which gets back to the argument of preserving the games themselves (which I think has a lot of merit) versus preserving the culture around them. And people tend to conflate the two because they think “we are preserving culture” gives them a stronger argument.
Ah, I think I get what’s happening here: video games are culture. Youre misinterpreting it as meaning “the culture around games” but we mean it literally as “a work of art/part of culture”, like “high culture art” or similar phrases. People preserve paintings, why not games? Both are culture
Because they are very different problems. And conflating the two is how you end up losing masters because “there are VHSes with it on it”.
Preserving a game isn’t about preserving the culture around it at the time of its release. It’s about a set of rules that the player can interact with that tend to lead to a certain type of experience. People playing Marvel vs. Capcom 2 will fall into basically the same meta that the game evolved into about 15 years ago, because those rules encourage using those characters.
Yes, we should have more distinct versions of updated games that we can choose to upgrade to, or not, by our own choice. It’s absolute garbage that you can have a version of Overwatch that you enjoy that can just be taken away from you on a whim.
Which I don’t disagree with (even if I suspect I do tend to lean more toward not making extra work for overworked devs than many)
The issue is arguing that you are preserving the culture when that very much isn’t Because what “meta” is there in MvC2 without other players? We all had our moment of “I am really good at Tekken” when we played against bots… and then were completely demolished by some kid at a truck stop who actually knew combos.
Which gets to what we see in reality where we DO have basically every version of MvC2 because it was before software patching was common. I would need to check what is popular for specifics but, like with all games, some versions get played and some don’t. And it doesn’t matter if you have every single revision of Karnov’s Revenge AND two different fan patches to rebalance it: if nobody plays it the meta doesn’t exist. MAYBE you can get a hotel room play of a version or two as a curiosity at Combo Breaker.
But you aren’t going to get a proper meta unless it is someone referencing a text guide that was also preserved. And that isn’t actually a “meta”. That is someone knowing combo strings or exploits. Because the meta that builds up around a fighting game involves people learning those combos and learning how to counter them and determining what is best and so forth. Otherwise? You are the kid who can consistently do a dragon punch up against the guy who can’t even do a hadouken.
Which gets back to the difference between preserving games/bytes and preserving culture.
The way they patched those games in the 90s was to call it a sequel. It came out about a year, sometimes sooner, after the last one. And in doing it that way, we got to keep every version. PC games used to give you installers for every patch. If patching is done sparingly, and focused on minor changes or bug fixes, this is manageable. I’m sure plenty of devs would argue that this doesn’t work for their game, but the alternative is that we just lose it all to time.
MVC2 is preserved as long as you’ve got at least one other person to play it with. With a Discord server, you could fill out a lobby even for a game like MAG that has over 100 players in a match, provided they actually gave you the server to run it yourself.
Actually quite a lot of games had multiple revisions even as far back as cartridges. That is why you’ll often hear a speedrunner say “This is done on the 1.01 North American version” and the like. Mostly my point was more to say that there is no question of “did every single patch get archived”
And as a huge Dawn of War fan: you can have every single patcher from Fileplanet and STILL not have a snowball’s chance of getting the version you want. But that is more comedic than not.
Because:
MVC2 is preserved as long as you’ve got at least one other person to play it with.
You can play MVC2. You can’t preserve the CULTURE of mvc2. Because, to switch gears to Third Strike: You and me probably aren’t going to do the kind of insane crap that folk like Daigo are able to do.
But also, like I mentioned above: You can get a hotel room game going. You won’t have anywhere near enough thoery crafting and experience to really run into cases where one character is noticeably better than another.
With a Discord server, you could fill out a lobby even for a game like MAG that has over 100 players in a match, provided they actually gave you the server to run it yourself.
Let me tell you something as a Tribes 2 player. I can basically get a full server most nights of the week. But all the folk who are still playing Tribes? They never stopped. So the experience of hopping into a game in 2024 is absolutely nothing like it was back in 2004. It is a completely different kind of amazing but it is not “Tribes 2” from a “cultural” standpoint
The multiple cartridges is splitting hairs. Often they just output at different television standards or fixed a rare game breaking bug. They didn’t add a new character or change how many are on a team, which is a fundamentally different game design.
If you sit two people in a room long enough with Third Strike, they will end up playing Yun and Chun-Li. If you sit two people in a room long enough with MVC2, they will end up playing Magneto, Storm, and Sentinel. No one had to tell me to play Fox in Melee before I had any idea that there was a Melee “scene”; the rules of the game steered me that way after hundreds or perhaps thousands of hours. That’s what you preserve when the game can still be played.
Interesting points, but you’re missing an important point: This isn’t necessarily about the definition of what SHOULD be or MUST be preserved, but whether studios should be allowed to PREVENT it from being preserved by those who want to.
I mean, many of us are trying. It’s fuckin’ hard tho when your opposition has billions of dollars and politicians in their back-pocket and our side’s greatest asset is the voice of Gordon Freeman from Ross’s Game Dungeon presents Freeman’s Mind.
we also should be supporting open source games—if it’s open source, it’s preservable! these people are already essentially giving up any revenue just to make something for someone else, we should be lifting them up, too!
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