They left it small so that it wouldn’t be worth it to fight in court and they’d either just settle for a license fee or pay the fine. But sounds like the best way would be to get the patents revoked, but that’s probably more expensive than just paying the fine due to the legal fees.
The only issue with current systems is that the “AI” is tweaked to the specific game mechanics. You can easily enough build multiple algorithms for varying play styles and then have it adapt to counter the play style of the player. The problems is that the current way that many games are monetized is through expansions, gameplay tweaks, etc., as well as those being necessary when a game mechanic turns out to be really poorly implemented or just unpopular and the mechanics change. If the “AI” isn’t modified at the same time to rake advantage of the changes, then it becomes easy to beat. The other issue is that eventually a human can learn all of the play style algorithms and learn to counter them and then it becomes boring.
Unfortunately, generative “AI” is not a true learning model and thus not truly intelligent in any sense of the word. It requires that it is only “taught” with good information. So if it gets any data that includes even slight mistakes, it can end up making lots of those mistakes repeatedly. And if those mistakes aren’t corrected by a human, it doesn’t understand which things were mistakes and how they contributed to winning or losing. It can’t learn that they were mistakes or to not do them. It doesn’t truly understand how to decide something is wrong on its own, only that things are related and how often it should use those relationships over others. Which means manual training is required, which due to the sheer volume of information required to train a generative “AI”, is not possible in a complex game where the player has thousand of possible moves that each branch to thousands of possible combinations of moves, etc.
So that’s about 15 hours before exceeding your Comcast data cap for the month (1.2TB) assuming you don’t use your internet for anything else that month. Then after that it starts costing you about $16/hr to play in data usage alone. ($10 per 50GB)
To get sorted to the top of the lists for biggest discount. To claim bigger losses in copyright infringement cases. And to increase the perceived immediacy to buy it to get a good deal to take advantage of impulse buying whereas if they have time to think about it they may not buy it at all. Plus rich people don’t care how much something costs, so you’ll get a few of them here and there buying it at full price.
If you like this genre of games, then this is one of the best, so yes, play it. It’s a great, addictive, one more… kind of game with a ton of stuff to do, lots of goals short and long term.
I never really care for the dating sim portion of these kinds of games all that much, so I can’t comment on that part much, but the rest is great!
Just wish they would have incorporated the fixes into the game engine at some point. I bet some of the devs would have even signed away the code for free or at least very cheap. It was annoying not being able to use mods to fix bugs in Fallout 76 that were patched in Fallout and Elder Scrolls games some as far back as Morrowind. Sure they were mostly rare like being able to get pushed into the void behind what should have been solid meshes and the game engine seeming not to care as you fall endlessly or it crashed.