lmao not their fault other companies never thought of a cool idea ever. good on them for preventing these losers from piggybacking of their innovation and ingenuity
@@redpilledfag dude, there were others before it. the only unique part is the most unrealistic one of it. that they don't die or get resurrected. keeping score as relationship existed way before, or a game AI evolving with you. I mean it's cool idea but not unique. I think if other companies have to work around it, it's better than if they could just straight up copy it. 3d printers had a patent, and when it was expired, everyone started making it, they straight up copy it, reduce it to barebones, and sell it cheap. probably most of them will never even improve on the products. so yeah, in a different setting, with a few other twists, I can see it work. also I see resemblance in some games that were having similar stuff before it. because sometime you wouldn't think a sport game has many things in common with an rpg or a mediaeval strategy game, but some ideas would work in other games or already exist but nobody plays both to see it.
@@captaindred342 It doesn't necessarily work that way. Those earlier companies don't have an incentive to spend effort in invalidating the patent *unless* ID actually sues them for infringement. ID could in principle (if it decided to be unethical) focus only on game creators for which such a lawsuit is a big burden and thus would be more likely to settle than fight to the end.
@@efestus5 actually it took WB 4 tries to get the patent and in the end they only have the patent for the system called the “Nemesis” system as related to fantasy orcs and stuff. Can this lead to WB suing everyone who makes something remotely related? Probably because good luck getting a judge to not immediately dismiss a lawsuit.
@@efestus5 from how I see the patent. As long as the system isn't just for ranks/titles of enemies, you should be able to get away with it. Like if you make it more subtle and maybe make it so you have one rival rather than multiple. I don't know, I'd have to read the patent properly and see how it could be done. I seem to recall a game design UA-camr talking about how certain patents could be worked around.
@@gadgetwolf1996 I'd also get an extremely competent team of lawyers. There's a pretty big difference between 'hypothetical patent workaround you can brainstorm about in a vid' and 'actual design that will hold up in court as not violating patent copyright'.
Patenting game mechanics is a silly and toxic practice. Pretty much assures that the mechanic simply won't be used and most likely isn't so ground breaking as to be an industry standard even if it weren't patented. Some of these games companies are way up their own arse
I'll guess it could be patented from a purely technical standpoint. But not from the effective standpoint. Just because a narrative technique in film or literature exists and has been analyzed back and forth over the centuries doesn't mean that everyone is good at them, just like that.
@@abaddonanon7573 Sorry but these are not a big know-how and some of them not their first attempt to make it. In this case if everybody start to patent his """original""" game design idea that's just screw the whole system at all..... stupid lazy annoying thing. More like a patent troll stuff than anything else...
"Medium was the first game to allow simultaneous control of two characters on the screen at the same time." There's a few games on kongregate from like 2008 that beg to differ.
oh man there were so many flash games exactly like that, but the people in charge of the patents dont do research into the market so its all about who can afford lawyers
There was a game on DSi Ware called Divergent Shift that uses the exact same concept. One character controlled by one player in two environments. There's also a game called Chronos Twins with the same concept. Both these games were available over 5 years before the patent was even filed. I'm not a lawyer, but there's plenty of "prior art" to justify ignoring this patent.
JJ Abrams patents the lense flairs. If one plot point takes multiple episodes to complete, you're sued by the makers of DBZ. Tommy Weiseu patents terribad.
The chicken glasses were shaded red, so as to filter out the color of blood. Apparently chickens will peck each other to death, and the glasses stopped that.
This is EXACTLY the sort of behaviour from chickens that causes me such moral ambiguity in games like Fable - is kicking these chickens NOT the righteous, heroic deed needed to save good creatures from their fowl, unblinking gaze?
This is crossing WAY over the line. Patents exist to protect creators from having their ideas stolen, not to restrict artists from innovating off of existing pieces of art.
IMO patents should exist only until the inventor has a product developed and in the consumer market. So that they're protected from copying for a period of time at which point others can introduce their own competitive variants. On the other hand there needs to be some sane limitations on how long they can delay introducing a product to the market, because otherwise corporations would take patents out on things and never use them (as they already do). In general patents need to be more lenient towards individual inventors and way, way harsher towards corporations (and patent trolls).
@@uncannyvalley2350 without copyright large corporations can just copy any product and bring it to market cheaper, leaving creators out of the loop entirely. Why would anyone bother to invent anything when it will just be stolen?
Absolutely, and it is more evidence of how everything is rigged. Imagine how many patents like these there are to prevent small Game Devs from producing the games they imagined, then imagine this exact kind of thing in every other industry. There are monopolies in place in every major industry pulling things like this that should be illegal but they're big enough to get away with it.
lol you should go look into all the patents China buys just so no one can make the "thing" at all. They don't even make it either. They just buy the patent to stuff it away so no one can have it. It's literally stopped entire industries from being created.
@@Dilligff or like the guy who created the original VantaBlack and wouldn't sell it to anybody. lol. And then other people made better formula's and made it available to everyone just to spite him hahaha
Ok so, they will be implementing it in "Wonder Woman" game that will be released... probably this year? No official announcement yet. Now the Nemesis system is something really complicated with many many many things to test, lets hope that they will not Patent it this time if it works and we get to see it in other games as well
lmao i'm glad they patented it. other companies shouldn't piggyback off great innovations that other came up with. why don't they try being ingenious themselves and come up with something
The idea is to patent something in case you want to use it again. If you do, then you don't have to compete against other products that do it better than you. This also makes it more expensive for other companies to make a comparable product, which is an advantage for you. (scummy, but you know, that's business, even though I hate it)
@@bleh329 Because of supply and demand, for one thing. IF they made 10 different games with the same patent, it would flood the market and likely end up in reduced sales. But by having only 1 game with the patent/system it makes it more exclusive and drives up the sales.
@@aSinisterKiid I'm going to imagine that in each sentence you wrote the words "companies think". Because that's a load of crap. It's something I'd believe corporate shills think, or an excuse they'd employ for this patent idiocy. But that's it.
Great, but infuriating, video. These are awesome examples of how patent law is exploited. Patents are supposed to be there to protect innovators and inventors who take time and effort developing an idea, but these ideas were so general in essentially all circumstances that there's nothing to protect.
and most of them were either entirely or partly done before. even the nemesis system isn't actually that original as games that remember your actions (like fable) predate it by quite a bit. Games that get harder the more you die also predate it as well. It's totally bullshit that you can patent a step in the natural evolution of a game mechanic and pretend like you are a genius.
I'd make the argument that patenting the exact combination of mechanics that makes a Crazy Taxi game is valid. It is a bit annoying when these companies patent these ideas and then just sit on them without using them more than once or twice, though.
If they're such general ideas why were the patent holders the first to come up with them and not somebody else? Saying "pssh, I could have thought of that" is easy to say about anything whether it's a song, a movie premise, or a video game mechanic. I think you underestimate and underappreciate how much time, research, coding, and brainstorming it takes to fully realize a game mechanic. It's not fair that another company can take an idea that initially took months or possibly years of exhaustive labor to complete and stand on the shoulders of the previous developer. These copycats are then able to condense months and years of work into just a few days or weeks because someone else laid all the groundwork and the assets are fully available to them. I say more power to the patent holders. Video game developers have it tough these days as it is without publishers sucking their teets dry.
@@inquizition9672 The problem is that it doesn't matter that you give it a name, that doesn't make it an original idea that should be patentable. The nemesis system is just the natural evolution of a game having proper adaptable difficulty levels. Doesn't matter if its called friend/foe system, baddy system, procedural difficulty system, it's the same concept. That would be like trying to patent realistic physics in a game and naming it the Newtonian System. Enemies being able to remember their interaction with you is such an obvious next step that it's silly to claim it as an original idea.
you wouldn't think like that if you invented something but had no means of producing it, sell it and make money out of it before a multinational corporation comes, copies your idea and sell it to make even more money, than they already have. Just like Bell copied the idea of the telephone from Meucci who didn't have moneyl for the patent, just sayin'.
@@N4SP92 Oh, yeah I guess it's way better to have them buy the patent from you for little more than what you paid for the patent itself because they know that you can't use your patent without them. Just admit it already. Patents don't work! And in the software industry they are especially bad and actively hinder innovation!
The biggest problem with patents today is patent trolling by law firms. These legal entities go out and buy questionable patents, then stretch them to the limit with legal jujitsu, and sue everyone they can. Patents should have a strict rule where it is not recognized unless you are actively making use of it. If youre not a software company or a manufacturer making use of the patent, you should not be suing companies making actual products and demanding tribute from them to avoid going to court.
The nemesis system in SoM/SoW is awesome until the game starts spitting out orcs who are immune to every form of attack other than left handed dart throwing.
The medium pitch meeting "I've desiged this really cool duel screen mechanic" "That's awesome, what new game play mechanics does that allow us to use?" "Why are you asking me?" "Alright, how about interesting and unique puzzles?" "I don't know" Seriously all that game did was horde a great idea from people with actual talent in game design.
Imagine how horrifying it would be to these companies to know they contributed to the advancement of gaming as a whole ... without being able to monetize it. The poor greedy sods.
yeah carmegeddon did it in the late 90's. plenty of other driving games with pedestrians as well. this is an example of something so basic nobody thought to patent it before a greedy CEO decided it was possible.
It's all of the ideas combined, not just one. That wasn't greedy; that was generous of them. It's saying essentially, "don't recreate our game under a different name. Remove the big arrow, and we'll let it slide."
Yes the enemies “occasionally “ come back in the nemesis system. Tell that to the guy I killed literally 15 times who became so hard to kill I just decided he could keep a fort
I had one in SOM. Immune to arrows, stealth and normal attacks and enraged by caragors and fire. It was a hunter who also dealt massive damage and had a group of bodyguards. Only weakness was that he was terrified of morgul flies and allies betraying him. I had to train a warlord with bodyguards specifically to take him out. And even then it took 3 tries before he was actually dead.
I had one that angered me by killing me in the early game. Eventually, I was able to take him out. He came back missing a body part. Killed him again by chopping off his head. He came back with an iron head reattacher. Killed him again. He came back again nearly brain dead. Felt so bad at that point I tamed him and gave him his own fort
I actually stopped playing because of it. I kept getting attacked by the same guy, and I could only kill him a third of the time, and every time I did, he cheated death. By the time I stopped playing, he was immune to everything I had access to, and several things I hadn’t unlocked yet.
A friend of mine ended up getting a nemesis in Shadow of Mordor of the rather descriptively named Mumbler variety. So whenever the ork would show up, it would zoom in dramatically, he'd start pointing and waving his arms flamboyantly, while his face was slack jawed and uttering "hrrn mmm drrr hrndr".
I've been trying to find the video in which it was shown just how insane you could drive a Nemesis by showing us, finally, a massive ork reduced to making weird warbling noises...
I had a one that cheated death 10+ times who was lethally vulnerable to poison... and had poison weapon and possibly poison ability. He just showed up and killed himself over and over, by the end he just crying and begging me to kill him :(
I WISH I got all these fun Nemesis encounters, but after playing it fresh off the heels of Arkham City, the combat was second nature to me, and I killed everyone I fought. Only ever died once or twice to any open world orcs, killed them if I ever met them again, and got lucky with my takedowns being permanent decapitations. Only time I died multiple times to one captain was that one guy from the game's "challenges" who has every immunity under the sun, and can only take damage from takedowns. The one guy who should've been my nemesis, and he's an optional challenge that's incapable of being in the Nemesis system.
@@barret-xiii Sad really, the game benefits from being overwhelmed, or fumble from time to time. Though the cheat death rolls do not care about how permanent you think your decapitations are, you just got unlucky with it's rarity.
You can either let your innovations take root in the industry and have your game (and company) become a timeless source of inspiration, or cash all that in for a paltry sum before your ideas quickly get dropped down the memory hole.
at that point isn't this practise inhuman, also i see only usa is doing these patents cause it's a shit hole nation, why not just avoid selling games in usa?
if the prince of Persia games where not ubi i would have said the same thing about 2007 assassin's creed 1 i think i remember that the idea was to make a new pop game or something like it
Well Assasins Creed copied Persia games (made by the same company but still) similarly Shadow games copied Batman games, which again, mate by same company. Game mechanics should not be patented. Similar with any type of source code. Only assets should be a subject of patent.
@@zhenweilai799 Yeah, I thought of that too. The only problem is that EA would probably make even more money from this and I don't want then to make any money given what greedy bastards they are. Besides, the other publishers like Activision Blizzard would just find some kind of even more despicable workaround.
You know, if Nintendo wanted, they could easily implement a sanity meter in a Luigi’s Mansion game. As Luigi gets spooked, he would slowly lose courage or whatever the bar was to represent, and if he lost all his courage he would then run back to the safe room/the last room he de-ghosted and the player would have to try the section again. The only question is, how do you replenish the meter without necessary manually taking Luigi to a ghost-free zone each time.
Other ideas for that: If Luigi's sanity is too low, he starts seeing hallucinated ghosts and Toads and E. Gadd start spouting nonsense. As for how to replenish it: Capture ghosts and don't stay in the dark for too long. Or talk to friendly faces. Or maybe eat mushrooms (an unusual case where mushrooms make you SANER).
This is the episode that made me the saddest. So many ideas locked in a vault, because someone had easy access to lawyers. Humanity as a whole is worse for it.
@@niggacockball7995 Not really, all that does is provide you an C H A N C E of winning the court case that WILL follow, or at least avoiding a full action, because these legal departments WILL press charges, and can often win even if the case makes little sense. And why risk it? Some small company is going to get bled absolutely dry trying to defend itself from these megacorps sending legal battle gauntlets at them for years.
Totally agree. Most of these parents are for the most obvious practical engineering solutions to the simple mechanics of game design. A patent for a rotating wheel to choose different options? FFS why not allow a patent for the wheel itself.
Yeah patents are not good. We should be able to protect the ability to use our ideas but when we stop other people from utilizing a common idea at no personal loss to ourselves everyone loses.
This is disheartening, imagine how many awesome games we could've seen using some of these mechanics. I think minigames on the loading screen is the most aggravating patent, it should be an industry standard 😂
@@joshualuigi220 even more disheartening. By time people could actually make use of it technology has moved past the point where it would be helpful. So many boring ass loading screens in the past lmao
But also think again if the flooded market of carbon copies. Sum patents I feel are necessary because without a lot of these ideas would’ve been used excessively but countless companies
@@zelokorLocalGodOfChaosAndBread that has no real correlation as this is video games. I can understand why insulin shouldn’t be patented, but that’s on a different level than game mechanics
@@DoctorPecker "Hey we've patented reloading while running give us more money. Also we patented ledge vaulting. We also patented entering a car from the opposite side in a first person perspective."
@@DoctorPecker "Yeah the fact that enough game features can be patented off making game development a legal nightmare isn't really a problem because I said so. Here's some vague advice that only serves to make you work harder on an already hard job."
Then again ... if you want to use a patented system you could also contact the patent holder, agree on a fair compensation for the patented feature/system and then use it. That is sort of the idea behind patents. If other companies are not willing to pay the fair compensation and thus choose not use those game systems is not the fault of patents nor of patentholders.
@@Morrodin182 these patents do not protect grand intellectual ideas. they protect ppl with too much money because they want to make even more money. locking down what other ppl can do with their games. it's a stupid ass system and not what was originally intended with patents!
@@str0m I disagree. Lets take the parallel world example from the video. The developers who came up with this innovation had to put time and money into developing this new concept. They had to work out what actually works and what not and so on. When another studio picks up this idea and 100% implements it as described in the patent in their game, they effectively could compete with the first company in an unfair way as they were able to skip a whole part of the development process and thus cost. In other words it is only fair that the company who came up with the idea is allowed to protect its intellectual property and that is what these patents are for. In no way are you as company forbidden to contact the patentholder and come to an agreement with them. In fact, this is done regularly. IF you hold a patent AND a company contacts you AND you refuse to strike any realistic deal THEN we would be talking about something altogether BUT we are not. Anyway just my two cents on the matter.
@@Morrodin182 Not really, this is just - as mentioned before - a system to protect the ones having time and resources to submit a patent. According to your logic, pretty much every game genre in existence should be patented: rpg? patented progression/leveling up system, patented quests system; fps? patented gameplay feature where you hold a gun and are surrounded by foes trying to kill you; and so on... This is just plain stupid, and if someone wants to create a game that violates some patents and don't give a shit i'm going to buy this game, even if i don't like it, just to show them my support. Just sayin' :)
There should at least be a law that prohibits you from patenting a rather vague system (that could be used in such a diverse variety of different ways) if you NEVER USE IT EVER AGAIN *cough* _Warner Bros_ *cough*
Yep... that graphical interface one from Mass Effect is insanely generic. Theres a long history of patents that aren't for protecting unique ideas... but for grabbing hold of something obvious that anyone else would have thought of.
@@theenigma2861 like how Fox had to make a fantastic 4 movie every so often or the rights would revert to Marvel, which was basically the only reason for Fant4stic
Patents protect smaller companies from being taken advantage of by large companies that could copy them and undersell them. It also promotes innovation in most things
The chicken sunglasses are actually really important. Chickens go a bit insane at the sight of blood, and they attack and kill other chickens that are injured and bleeding for whatever reason.(which happens a lot more than you would think. Remember they have super sharp talons.) The red tinted sunglasses will make it so that everything they see is a tinge of red, and they don't notice blood, which stops them from killing the other chickens.
@@ToxicBastard it's so farmers don't lose a significant amount of there livestock because they're killing each other for no reason. One chicken gets attacked by a raccoon or something, but gets away, and then every other chicken attacks it and kills it, and those chickens get injured and started bleeding in the process, and it just snowballs from there. If a farm has 1000 chickens and this sort of brawl breaks out, they could lose literally hundreds of chickens from it.
@@ToxicBastard Chickens were _created_ by humans out of wild jungle fowl. Wild jungle fowl do not cram themselves in cheek by jowl in enclosed spaces voluntarily. There is no charity here, so don't sneer at the chickens. Sneer at the mentality that made them in the first place instead.
@@LaikaLycanthrope apparently in can occur even if chickens are not kept in cramped conditions. This awesome comment inspired me to do my own research: free range and barn chickens have the lowest rates of cannibalism but it still happens,
literally disgusting, the entire game is a poorly executed ripoff of silent hill and then they dare file a fucking pattent por the only """original""" component of the game
@@blizzardgaming7070 Not the same thing. Other games did that too years before Titanfall, like Dishonored. The way The Medium does it was unique, like playing 2 games at once while other games shifted between the 2 places.
i can’t think of the games rn, but i’ve definitely played games before where you control two characters at once in different realities, and they were older games than that game. But yeah Titanfall 2 is not an example of it because that’s one character you’re controlling shifting between realities.
I'll pass. The Nemesis system had its merits, but it's incredibly frustrating to repeatedly kill one of the orc bosses and get screwed over by the RNG, because the game has just decided this one orc should be allowed to cheat death indefinitely. Under these circumstances you can find yourself facing a ridiculously overpowered boss that is inexplicably immune to all the straightforward methods of dispatching enemies, and also gains even more power each time it unfairly curb-stomps you.
@@brandondriver99 That could be said for any game, but SoW creates a good balance of keeping the player godlike but also vulnerable on the hardest mode in my opinion. If Diablo gets like uber ridiculous then I think that means it’s game design is flawed. Never played Diablo though so I don’t know.
The idea of a patent is that a product is protected and you can profit from it, but some of these don't protect products, but small aspects of products. Mass Effect as an IP isn't hurt if another game had dialogue wheels, but other games would benefit from it. Games borrowing from predecessors is a big part of how games evolve. I mean, can you imagine if early metal bands copyrighted palm-muted tremolo picking so no other band could do it for 20 years? Well AT LEAST the patent rights only last a few years and not like copyrights which last decades after the author's death even.
Man the Nemesis systems patent still makes me mad. The Shadow of Mordor games were ripping off so many games and yet they patent their only original idea
@@TheKayech considering that Batman and Spider-Man have established rogues galleries with established backstories I don’t know that a system for randomly generating enemies with unique personalities would really work. Surely it would undermine the established lore.
@@marhawkman303 I don't think you need to be the first to make it, maybe back then, but definitely not now. Even back then, whoever first made it would have to prove they were the first when someone attempts to patent it or has it, which opens the possibility of getting away with it because the inventor doesn't have proof or isn't saying anything
not only that but the D-pad patent was specific enough to actually provoke the innovation that followed like sega genesis' 8 way pad which proved superior for inputting angle directions for example in games like mortal combat, meanwhile these game mechanics patents are built off stolen ideas as is and are far more likely to cause stagnation then innovation imo.
@@BobSmith-ly7fz exactly. That was what patents were for. To create innovation. Imagine a Sony PlayStation 1 with just a cross D-Pad. The specific enough nature of Nintendo’s patent allowed innovation in design and function.
The disguise system in Hitman is also patented, or was at some point... or something about Hitman's mechanics were at one point. I remember in the early 2000's there was supposed to be an open-world assassination based game that took place in some kind of futuristic city, and the main premise was you were an assassin or gun for hire that went around the city to kill various targets in various ways... but ioi Interactive or maybe Eidos at the time sued them for infringement and it canned development D=
Seems somewhat scummy as the concept of a disguise shouldn’t be patented, I mean the amount of games that have stealth and disguise like stuff is fair bit, such as Outer Worlds and Destroy all Humans. Not directly called disguise per say but still.
The frick ? That's such a broad concept... Assassination and disguise go hand in hand. God whoever accepts those patents are just morons who don't do 2 bits of research aren't they...
@@devilblackdeath Someone in Australia successfully patented swinging on a swing including a side to side motion to ascribe a circular path. They did it to show how dumb patent law is. By design: 1) Patent lawyers accept patent filings based on the idea that if they were unpatentable, the courts would sort them out. 2) Courts accept patent claims based on the idea that if they were unpatentable, the patent office would have rejected it.
@@markhackett2302 So they're all lazy hoping the other one won't be lazy. Seems like a sound system :S Then again we're talking about the animal race that was able to invent the concept of stock market so yeah...
Imagine playing something called Insane Mario Kart and you’re racing a player who’s gone insane and they’re swerving all over the place because they’re hallucinating banana peels
Shadow of war and shadow of mordor with the nemesis system and their systems for spies and such stuff had a great potential for personal revenge stories and conspiracies within the orc society. The games gave those orcs their own personality.
Similar system could have been put to use in a lot of setting. One could imagine a prohibition style story with the system taking care of mob bosses and their underlings rise to power as you take down characters in the organisation. Same with pirate flotillas, feudal kingdoms, etc. Any organised hierarchical social system really.
@@HalfpennyTerwilliger It could be used everywhere. It's in motion and you're never save. Those things and the little, individual stories of a single person made it so great.
@@HalfpennyTerwilliger Similar things DO exist. The patent's pretty narrow actually. It wasn't a new idea patented, but a new variation of an old idea.
It was just a RNG system. Orc body type A with name list B, weakness 1, 5, and 6, strength 2, 4, and 7. If you died, new roll of the RNG. And pick from set of pre recorded dialogues. Honestly it was way more annoying you couldn’t skip the speeches than the Nemesis system was even worth.
@@Ceece20 Tbh, ain't that the whole problem with "Nemesis System Patent" at the very core of it, it basically a Tweaked RNG System, and yet they fucking Patented it, like what the fuck do you even discover? this is not even like "Who is the Inventor of Bulb" kind of shit, this is was like what if EA Patented Simracing and Arcade Racing Mechanic in favor of "Saving" the NFS Franchise.
@@Azazantei this is true. I fucking hate companies trying to patent game mechanics. Only one on this list that was actually worthy of being patented was the D-pad. That was an actual thing at least, and it left enough room for people to get around it.
@@Ceece20 Which kinda makes it pointless, way to hold a strong patent. Though I shutter to think what the industry would have looked had it been harder to get around.
There's a Nintendo game franchise that already exists, has Mario characters in it and could very well use a sanity meter: Luigi's Mansion. Why they didn't incorporate one into the series after they got the patent for sanity meters is beyond me.
That was my first thought as well, and they could have made it very simple if they felt it was too intense for their intended audience. Just have ghost free rooms for him to calm down and recover in, and difficulty settings to make it more challenging for older players.
I knew that products could be patented but it's crazy to see systems/ideas patented. There should at least be a condition of continuous use/production of said product/system/idea with a termination of patent if not accounted for.
The nemesis system is one of the best parts of any game ever. Unbelievably genius and very well executed. What great time with both of those games. They need to make another game with the nemesis system
They never will, because no-one else can so there's no reason to ever compete with it. The only game they would grab sales from would be the ones they published earlier. Patents like this are a complete farce.
I’ll never forget in Shadow of Mordor when I lost like 4 times to a guy named Zangdush (Zang-douche). I finally beat him but then at the end when they revive the toughest orca you faced everyone was chanting “Zang-douche”, “Zang-douche” and I started flipping out.
"And no, we can't check dental records. There's no head."🤣🤣🤣 Genuinely laughed out loud. Way to casually stick the boot in there man. "We've showed you gruesome images. Now imagine there's no head. Do you want to hear about the entrails too?"🤣🤣🤣. It's been a long day.
This list is basically "we made a cool mechanic idea, but we arent sure if the game itself is as cool as the mechanic. Let's patent it so we doesnt have to deal with competitors who could perfected the idea or make it better than our game"
Wow, the Nemesis System. When I first started Shadow of Mordor, I jumper off the starting tower and was unceremoniously and immediately killed by a nearby orch, about five or six times in a row (dual wielding, poisoned weapons, poison boost. Just a WHOLE LOT of bad luck on my part). What I didn’t know then was that every time I died, that same bloody orch got promoted, and received stat boosts. He wound up being the absolute bane of my existence throughout the entire game. Even the endgame boss was a cakewalk in comparison.
100% agree, although I wonder how many (if any) innovations we appreciate today were created as an alternative to not being able to access patented mechanics or gameplay.
@@michaelrosenbaum4822 Most likely none since all of those things would have been built if they were going to build them anyway. There's also a huge first mover advantage so these patents really only prevent people who were developing something similar from building it.
I am stunned that NAMCO managed to get a patent on loading games in 1995 since many of the games in the 80s had similar things, an indie company called Llamasoft made many of their games for the Commodore 64 with this in place
The full quote is, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” This pretty much means that a crappy game could be good by blatantly copying a better game. It has nothing to do with paying homage to a game that 'inspired' them.
@@jardex2275 that quote is so wrong on so many levels it's hard to even begin pointing them out. Maybe that's why it's used without the second, really wrong half.
You're really close to asking the right question: Could you imagine what would happen if all humanity got together to make a functioning, humane global society?
If every dev team worked together on one project, it'd be a buggy mess. Different companies work in different engines, render using different software, and have different preferences towards genre and art style. Plus many stories of games with multiple dev teams do not have happy endings. Oh hi, Aliens: Colonial Marines!
Yeah, I can easily image the mess this would be. Imagine having at least 5 bosses that you have to get to sign off on something to do a single thing at work, then trying to figure out which boss is the most important one in this single task so you can get the details right and hope the other four don't get upset about it. Even if you removed the redundant overhead this is the type of nightmare attempting to make a game like that would be. IF the game was completed, it would be a very terrible game. Most people don't know this, but collaborating gets harder the more people you add to it, not easier, because getting humans to cooperate is like herding cats, even if they all want the same thing. The reason it's done is because it usually speeds up the process, so a dev can release more than one or two big games in their lifetime. Having a functional game release is a miracle every time.
Wait hold up, how could anyone get away with patenting a sanity meter? Tabletop's had those since at least the '80s. Also, thank you for calling out that that's not how mental health actually works! Pet peeve of mine, that.
"Wait hold up, how could anyone get away with patenting a sanity meter?" Nearly every single software patent ever filed, with very few exceptions, is something that already existed in the public domain but with "... on a COMPUTER!!!!" tacked on at the end.
@@kidanhone6048 Isn't it, though? Sure, there's no numbers, but if I stab someone enough times, they die. If I run for a long time, I get tired. Those are 1:1 correlations. But there isn't anything that will make you "go crazy" if you're exposed to it too often. Brains don't work that way. (Moreover, there isn't societal stigma against bleeding to death like there is with mental illness, but that's a different discussion.)
The dual reality pattent is BS. I remember playing Double Trpuble on the Apple II+. If the idea was used in the 80s, making a pattent for it now is a bit of a stretch.
I like how no company that filed for the patent has capitalized on said patent. Using it for one or 2 games and then tossing the concept letting it collect dust until the patent expires.
Pretty much this. It's also a shame that we can't dislike the horrible behaviour and/or topics through UA-cam. It's not the video itself that's bad but I'd still like to dislike these games companies for things that are essentially quality of life gaming improvements.
@@MorinehtarTheBlue Your dislikes are literally useless. They exist purely for weak catharsis. If you dislike it so much, just spit on a Warner Bros. logo or something, it'll accomplish more.
@@MorinehtarTheBlue Well he is not wrong, youtube is even thinking about removing dislikes alltogether because they don't want political stuff that is in line with their agenda to be downvoted. At this point spitting at the youtube and warnerbrothers logo might actually accomplish more.
@@MorinehtarTheBlue Seems like an overaction. His comment might have been rude but definitely not rude enough to warrant you calling him an asshole for stating a fact.
I LOVE that the nemesis system remembers your battles, and the enemies will gain different stats and even skins (scars, etc.) depending on your interactions with them in the past
Imagine a horror game with a nice calm mini game for loading screens- and it also serves as a break checkpoint! So one the games done loading, you can choose to keep playing the mini game if you so choose!
wc patent for nemesis was a sad day. what could have been a growth in ai across the industry was cauterized before it could even happen. guess we can just buckle in for prettier zombies
Or we can make a system that's just plain better. :V One thing about the nemesis system is that it's VERY player and combative focused. Some quick alterations would be to make it (a) also work with the AI in general (Yes the nemesis system also have rivaries, but that's nowhere as complex as the rivaries they have with the player), (b) implement biases such that even within the confines of the system they would still have their own quirks that influences relationships, (c) implement indirect influence (like everyone immediately hating you if you used a nuke, regardless of who you used it on), and (d) implement such systems on more than just combat, like trading and etc. You might notice that a lot of these improvements already exist in some form or another in 4x games.
I mean, how did they get a patent on dialogue wheels when they don't appear to be substantively different from pre-existing wheel-based menus in video games, like the now ubiquitous shortcut/inventory wheels, or the even older combat menus in multiple turn based JRPGs?
@@bleh329 Been working in a national patent office, and... you always know when they're reaching. Problem is, if their legal team finds an angle and can make an argument for how their application is in conformity with IP law in you country, no matter how blatant the bad faith is, you usually have to grant them the patent.
@@AcuteGoblinitis Is there any way for the general public to petition a patent court to overturn a patent by pointing out that is not an original idea?
@@lnsflare1 Depends on where you live and where the patent application was filed... there are some places where the public can oppose a patent while it's still under review*, after that, if the patent has been delivered it becomes a whole lot more complicated. *caveat: there is a limited time to do this, usually a few months, so unless you are working for the legal team of a competitor, and frequently and closely survey what's new in patent law, you'll probably miss it.
Yeah thank god, but imagine if it never patented in the first place, there so many games could use that in the past when loading screen is common. Now days, loading screen is pretty much nonexist thanks to SSD so the concept is practically useless.
It made me wonder how industry savvy patent reviewers have to be. Things that sound horribly general to gamers may sound sensibly specific to those only barely knowledgeable of the modern pastime.
@@patrickmccurry1563 the fact that someone was able to patent the very concept of a minigame in a loading screen goes to show how little they clearly know. It doesn't sound like it was just a specific mini game or the technology around that but rather the whole concept. That's crazy.
or the fact that the entire patent is stupid. it's just combining things other games already did. directional arrows are as old as 3d gaming, many racing games included pedestrians that would jump out of the way when the car came at them...and open world driving games were far from a new concept...hell I think carmegeddon had all of those features now that I think about it.
Alternative title: "Why being able to patent game mechanics is dumb shit." Imagine someone had patented playing with other people via the internet. Or having open worlds. Though the later might've been a blessing in disguise, considering how many horribly mediocre open world games there are.
I just wanted to comment that somebody should have patented open worlds, but it seems you got it before me, oh well. More shit like Witcher 2 not Skyrim is my wish.
@@DatAlien i think I wasn't clear in what I said. What I meant is that I want more open area games like Witcher 2, and less open world games like Skyrim. Excuse me for the misunderstanding.
Game developers: *build their games on the basis of ideas, concepts and gameplay mechanics that have been around before Also game developers: NOONE USE THIS GAMEPLAY MECHANIC THIS IS MINE
somehow people keep seeming to forget that dishonored 2 had a dual reality mission and it was by far the best executed one i have ever seen, no you dont have split screen, but you carry around a mirror thingy in your hand which shows you the other word which it is totally also rendered simultaneously, enemies walking around n shit and things you change in one effect the other. why are the sealing it like that is a big achievement for their game...
Video game patents are even more BS than software patents. Patents are a trade of short term exclusivity to get the individual/company making something to explain exactly how it works so in the future it can be innovated on instead of being kept a secret. If someone can easily figure out how a game mechanic would be implemented just by a look at the end product, it shouldn't be patentable. There's no value in trading the lost innovation for an explanation of something obvious. And in the games industry 20 years is not short term. I'd say no more than the dev cycle of 2 games is reasonable.
This is why intuitively is so rare in gaming, because any time something interesting is done the one who does it almost always hoards it all to themselves.
It does seem slightly strange that some of this is possible as within U.S. board game design law, you can't patent a rule, even a new one like tapping a card in Magic the Gathering. Yes, they tried and the answer was that anybody else could tap cards in their game, they just couldn't call it tapping. This suggests that a nemesis system for example, is not a game rule in which case, what the blazes is it?
Look at me, look at you, now back at me. here's a copy of that game you like, look over there, now back to me, it has become a patent. I'm riding a lawyer. Old Spice.
Financially, maybe. Artistically, no as by allowing others to use the system it allows others innovate and improve the system. Plus if your implementation of the system is actually good, you shouldn't need to feel threatened enough to patent it. Hence why the Arkham games are still one of the best examples of it despite alot of games taking a stab at it.
Imagine if Beethoven patented his Fifth Symphony. Music would be entirely different nowadays with how many musicians took inspiration from that iconic piece of music.
Bethesda _kind of_ went around BioWare's patent with fallout 4's speech "square": Up for additional information, down to quit interaction, left for sarcasm, and right to continue. During a Speech Check, these would be: Up for Medium difficulty, down to quit interaction, left for Hard difficulty and right to pass the Speech Check, losing the rewards. When attempting to disencourage someone out of something, the options would be listed as: Up to persuade, down to quit interaction, left to bribe and right to threat.
eh, sometimes. but i'd argue blatantly ripping off another game's mechanics isn't exactly utilizing 'creativity and innovation'. can we do more with these concepts, sure. would we want these concepts to be 'limited' in this fashion, not really. but at the same time, it's not exactly creative for an open world game to have you climbing some fucking thing to show off the map, just because ubisoft wants to cram that down the throat of every gamer. duplicating something that's already been done isn't really what i'd call 'innovative'.
@@leeman27534 there should really be some rule that stops companies from patenting ideas that already existed (ex. dual screen singleplayer, even if less developed as well as something that stops companies from using patents they aren't using at all (ex. the nemesis system). Or patenting ideas they weren't using or trying to patent a very broad concept.
@@justas423 wasn't exactly arguing for or against patents, my guy. merely, patents locking away some very specific things doesn't really 'stifle creativity and innovation' that much, if you essentially had to rip someone else's idea off 99%...
@@leeman27534 You act like 100 people don't have the same idea all the time. Stopping someone who is working at a small independent game company who doesn't have a team of lawyers from possibly making a better version of something that they started working on earlier from doing it doesn't help anyone.
The solution is to change how patents work. Ditch the monopoly and replace it with a prize. Come up with something useful and get a one-time prize of 100 years' worth of GDP Per Capita. That'd set you up for life and everyone else can make use of your invention.
i want an entire dlc area based on that. actually, we got that. i've got like 14 bl3 characters, most of them gotten from level 30 to like level 50, 55, 62, 70, whatever, from murdering a metric fuckton of claptraps.
Do any of the Borderlands games have a Claptrap player character? Like claptrap riding on another robot or something? That should be a thing. Or even be a giant claptrap tank.
![[UA] Eternal Fire проти NAVI | EPL Season 20 Malta](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/chvlsDygrZM/mqdefault.jpg)
The fact that Nemesis system patent exists just to prevent anyone from using such a cool idea ever makes me so mad
lmao not their fault other companies never thought of a cool idea ever. good on them for preventing these losers from piggybacking of their innovation and ingenuity
@@redpilledfag are they paying you to defend the company, or you're doing it for free?
@@MementoMoriGrizzly you just ended that mans carreare gave him a new one then endened it too
@@redpilledfag dude, there were others before it. the only unique part is the most unrealistic one of it. that they don't die or get resurrected. keeping score as relationship existed way before, or a game AI evolving with you. I mean it's cool idea but not unique. I think if other companies have to work around it, it's better than if they could just straight up copy it.
3d printers had a patent, and when it was expired, everyone started making it, they straight up copy it, reduce it to barebones, and sell it cheap. probably most of them will never even improve on the products.
so yeah, in a different setting, with a few other twists, I can see it work. also I see resemblance in some games that were having similar stuff before it. because sometime you wouldn't think a sport game has many things in common with an rpg or a mediaeval strategy game, but some ideas would work in other games or already exist but nobody plays both to see it.
Patent’s almost up I’m pretty sure
Edit: Yep, 2035 its public domain
Imagine patenting a system, basically holding it hostage for 20 years, and then being like "yeah, but we'll never use it again"
I think you can contest those and get them removed
Exactly! That's the problem with these dumb patents
Thats what they call: “a pro-gamer”-move.
Capitalism!
You literally described 99% of patents.
Imagine if ID, creators of DOOM patented the FPS...
Petty patents destroy creativity.
They woulda gotten their pants sued off by the companies that had put out FPS before ID did.
@@captaindred342 It doesn't necessarily work that way. Those earlier companies don't have an incentive to spend effort in invalidating the patent *unless* ID actually sues them for infringement. ID could in principle (if it decided to be unethical) focus only on game creators for which such a lawsuit is a big burden and thus would be more likely to settle than fight to the end.
Wolfenstein.....
@@njp4340 It wasn't the first FPS either lulz
@@captaindred342 was the first I heard of, maybe you could say the first to become well known at its time, though it was hardly game of the year
I guess this answers my question of why no one else has tried to do a nemesis system.
The XCOM War of the Chosen DLC wasn’t quite the same but was a little informed by it
You can use the nemesis system as an idea. But not how they implemented it.
@@efestus5 actually it took WB 4 tries to get the patent and in the end they only have the patent for the system called the “Nemesis” system as related to fantasy orcs and stuff.
Can this lead to WB suing everyone who makes something remotely related? Probably because good luck getting a judge to not immediately dismiss a lawsuit.
@@efestus5 from how I see the patent. As long as the system isn't just for ranks/titles of enemies, you should be able to get away with it. Like if you make it more subtle and maybe make it so you have one rival rather than multiple. I don't know, I'd have to read the patent properly and see how it could be done. I seem to recall a game design UA-camr talking about how certain patents could be worked around.
@@gadgetwolf1996
I'd also get an extremely competent team of lawyers. There's a pretty big difference between 'hypothetical patent workaround you can brainstorm about in a vid' and 'actual design that will hold up in court as not violating patent copyright'.
Patenting game mechanics is a silly and toxic practice. Pretty much assures that the mechanic simply won't be used and most likely isn't so ground breaking as to be an industry standard even if it weren't patented. Some of these games companies are way up their own arse
indeed
and his lawyers
I'll guess it could be patented from a purely technical standpoint. But not from the effective standpoint. Just because a narrative technique in film or literature exists and has been analyzed back and forth over the centuries doesn't mean that everyone is good at them, just like that.
@@abaddonanon7573 Sorry but these are not a big know-how and some of them not their first attempt to make it. In this case if everybody start to patent his """original""" game design idea that's just screw the whole system at all..... stupid lazy annoying thing. More like a patent troll stuff than anything else...
It is purely USA practice. Most other countries don't allow sh(it like that
"Medium was the first game to allow simultaneous control of two characters on the screen at the same time." There's a few games on kongregate from like 2008 that beg to differ.
oh man there were so many flash games exactly like that, but the people in charge of the patents dont do research into the market so its all about who can afford lawyers
I can't remember the name but there are a game on famicom(nes) that has thing like this around 2 decades before Medium.
There was a game on DSi Ware called Divergent Shift that uses the exact same concept. One character controlled by one player in two environments.
There's also a game called Chronos Twins with the same concept. Both these games were available over 5 years before the patent was even filed. I'm not a lawyer, but there's plenty of "prior art" to justify ignoring this patent.
There is also the two brothers game where one player control two characters at the same time, diferent idea but same premise
@@dj3001123 "BUT THAT'S IN THE SAME ENVIRONMENT." -some snotty patent troll lawyer.
Imagine if movies started pulling shit like this...
"M. Night Shyamalan patents the concept of plot twists."
JJ Abrams patents the lense flairs. If one plot point takes multiple episodes to complete, you're sued by the makers of DBZ. Tommy Weiseu patents terribad.
Michael Bay sues for too much use of explosions in one take.
I would of course patent "Plot Armor" 😂💯
@@justamanofculture12 I'm gonna patent 'Plot'!
What a twist!
The chicken glasses were shaded red, so as to filter out the color of blood.
Apparently chickens will peck each other to death, and the glasses stopped that.
... and knowing is half the battle.
GI SHMOE!!
Replying to boost this. You're at 69 likes...not going mess that up
@@daholyvagabond Well it´s ruined now. Boost away.
This is EXACTLY the sort of behaviour from chickens that causes me such moral ambiguity in games like Fable - is kicking these chickens NOT the righteous, heroic deed needed to save good creatures from their fowl, unblinking gaze?
This is crossing WAY over the line. Patents exist to protect creators from having their ideas stolen, not to restrict artists from innovating off of existing pieces of art.
IMO patents should exist only until the inventor has a product developed and in the consumer market. So that they're protected from copying for a period of time at which point others can introduce their own competitive variants. On the other hand there needs to be some sane limitations on how long they can delay introducing a product to the market, because otherwise corporations would take patents out on things and never use them (as they already do). In general patents need to be more lenient towards individual inventors and way, way harsher towards corporations (and patent trolls).
Copyright shouldn't exist period, change my mind
@@uncannyvalley2350 without copyright large corporations can just copy any product and bring it to market cheaper, leaving creators out of the loop entirely. Why would anyone bother to invent anything when it will just be stolen?
Like China copies (steals) our new technologies and no one can stop them.
Absolutely, and it is more evidence of how everything is rigged. Imagine how many patents like these there are to prevent small Game Devs from producing the games they imagined, then imagine this exact kind of thing in every other industry. There are monopolies in place in every major industry pulling things like this that should be illegal but they're big enough to get away with it.
missed opportunity... "sometimes they did, and it was fine, and sometimes they did, and it was fined"
Good, i'm not the only one who thought they missed their chance here!
cool
Ikr lol 😂
I didn’t expect to be made furious by what can be patented, but here we are.
lol you should go look into all the patents China buys just so no one can make the "thing" at all. They don't even make it either. They just buy the patent to stuff it away so no one can have it. It's literally stopped entire industries from being created.
Reminds me of the time Owens-Corning tried to trademark the color pink.
@@Dilligff or like the guy who created the original VantaBlack and wouldn't sell it to anybody. lol. And then other people made better formula's and made it available to everyone just to spite him hahaha
@ニコ yea I would have done the same exact thing.
Wait til you figure out that what you're actually mad about is capitalism.
Man, I love the nemesis system. A shame they patented it. Could be implemented in such a cool way in other games.
-pulse heightens at possibility of nemesis system in Dead Space or other horror games
Ok so, they will be implementing it in "Wonder Woman" game that will be released... probably this year? No official announcement yet.
Now the Nemesis system is something really complicated with many many many things to test, lets hope that they will not Patent it this time if it works and we get to see it in other games as well
lmao i'm glad they patented it. other companies shouldn't piggyback off great innovations that other came up with. why don't they try being ingenious themselves and come up with something
Companies can apply and pay to use the patent.
@@nathanielbass771 NO THANKS
7 Companies that stopped good ideas from being built upon
Yo mama
and parasite lawyers who support and approve this...
Trouble with all of these patents: RELEASE MORE GAMES SINCE YOU OWN THE PATENT!
I know, right?! But their logic is more like: let's patent this idea, so *no one* can use it! Because we won't!
The idea is to patent something in case you want to use it again. If you do, then you don't have to compete against other products that do it better than you. This also makes it more expensive for other companies to make a comparable product, which is an advantage for you. (scummy, but you know, that's business, even though I hate it)
@@azyrael96 Right. Could you please explain why they often don't, then? I do believe that was the point of the comment.
@@bleh329 Because of supply and demand, for one thing. IF they made 10 different games with the same patent, it would flood the market and likely end up in reduced sales. But by having only 1 game with the patent/system it makes it more exclusive and drives up the sales.
@@aSinisterKiid I'm going to imagine that in each sentence you wrote the words "companies think". Because that's a load of crap. It's something I'd believe corporate shills think, or an excuse they'd employ for this patent idiocy. But that's it.
Great, but infuriating, video. These are awesome examples of how patent law is exploited. Patents are supposed to be there to protect innovators and inventors who take time and effort developing an idea, but these ideas were so general in essentially all circumstances that there's nothing to protect.
and most of them were either entirely or partly done before. even the nemesis system isn't actually that original as games that remember your actions (like fable) predate it by quite a bit. Games that get harder the more you die also predate it as well.
It's totally bullshit that you can patent a step in the natural evolution of a game mechanic and pretend like you are a genius.
I'd make the argument that patenting the exact combination of mechanics that makes a Crazy Taxi game is valid. It is a bit annoying when these companies patent these ideas and then just sit on them without using them more than once or twice, though.
If they're such general ideas why were the patent holders the first to come up with them and not somebody else? Saying "pssh, I could have thought of that" is easy to say about anything whether it's a song, a movie premise, or a video game mechanic. I think you underestimate and underappreciate how much time, research, coding, and brainstorming it takes to fully realize a game mechanic. It's not fair that another company can take an idea that initially took months or possibly years of exhaustive labor to complete and stand on the shoulders of the previous developer. These copycats are then able to condense months and years of work into just a few days or weeks because someone else laid all the groundwork and the assets are fully available to them.
I say more power to the patent holders. Video game developers have it tough these days as it is without publishers sucking their teets dry.
@@inquizition9672 The problem is that it doesn't matter that you give it a name, that doesn't make it an original idea that should be patentable.
The nemesis system is just the natural evolution of a game having proper adaptable difficulty levels.
Doesn't matter if its called friend/foe system, baddy system, procedural difficulty system, it's the same concept.
That would be like trying to patent realistic physics in a game and naming it the Newtonian System.
Enemies being able to remember their interaction with you is such an obvious next step that it's silly to claim it as an original idea.
@@carsonm7292 Trade dress or copyright maybe. Patent though??
When the patent system actively stifles innovation and iteration, it has failed its foundational purpose and should be reformed or removed.
I wasn't aware those crappy LOTR games had stifled innovation or had any effect whatsoever in the world.
Software patents in general are questionable.
you wouldn't think like that if you invented something but had no means of producing it, sell it and make money out of it before a multinational corporation comes, copies your idea and sell it to make even more money, than they already have. Just like Bell copied the idea of the telephone from Meucci who didn't have moneyl for the patent, just sayin'.
@@N4SP92 Oh, yeah I guess it's way better to have them buy the patent from you for little more than what you paid for the patent itself because they know that you can't use your patent without them.
Just admit it already. Patents don't work! And in the software industry they are especially bad and actively hinder innovation!
The biggest problem with patents today is patent trolling by law firms. These legal entities go out and buy questionable patents, then stretch them to the limit with legal jujitsu, and sue everyone they can. Patents should have a strict rule where it is not recognized unless you are actively making use of it. If youre not a software company or a manufacturer making use of the patent, you should not be suing companies making actual products and demanding tribute from them to avoid going to court.
The nemesis system in SoM/SoW is awesome until the game starts spitting out orcs who are immune to every form of attack other than left handed dart throwing.
Until left handed index finger paper folding bottle caps with a towel
This made me think of one of the most deadly assassin skills: left handed fart throwing lol.
The medium pitch meeting
"I've desiged this really cool duel screen mechanic"
"That's awesome, what new game play mechanics does that allow us to use?"
"Why are you asking me?"
"Alright, how about interesting and unique puzzles?"
"I don't know"
Seriously all that game did was horde a great idea from people with actual talent in game design.
alternate title: 7 game ideas that pretty much could become a whole no genre of gaming but nooooo
Imagine how horrifying it would be to these companies to know they contributed to the advancement of gaming as a whole ... without being able to monetize it. The poor greedy sods.
The nemesis system technically _did_ become a "genre".
Dual reality splitscreen *was* a whole genre.
@@trapezoid5810 How so?
Unfortunatelly, the suits dont have enough brain to think past immediate profit
Crazy taxi patent for pedestrians to move out of the way when car incoming : *EXISTS*
Pedestrians in other games: "Guess I'll just die"
the joke is that this system is implemented/introduced before crazy taxi even existed....
Change that to Truck so you can isekai pedestrians 🤣
yeah carmegeddon did it in the late 90's. plenty of other driving games with pedestrians as well. this is an example of something so basic nobody thought to patent it before a greedy CEO decided it was possible.
It's all of the ideas combined, not just one. That wasn't greedy; that was generous of them. It's saying essentially, "don't recreate our game under a different name. Remove the big arrow, and we'll let it slide."
Yes the enemies “occasionally “ come back in the nemesis system. Tell that to the guy I killed literally 15 times who became so hard to kill I just decided he could keep a fort
I had one in SOM. Immune to arrows, stealth and normal attacks and enraged by caragors and fire. It was a hunter who also dealt massive damage and had a group of bodyguards. Only weakness was that he was terrified of morgul flies and allies betraying him.
I had to train a warlord with bodyguards specifically to take him out. And even then it took 3 tries before he was actually dead.
I would destroy them specifically in a way to avoid the most annoying. It was easy to abuse after a point.
I had one that angered me by killing me in the early game. Eventually, I was able to take him out. He came back missing a body part. Killed him again by chopping off his head. He came back with an iron head reattacher. Killed him again. He came back again nearly brain dead. Felt so bad at that point I tamed him and gave him his own fort
@@reesepatrick1036 You're a stand-up guy, Reese.
I actually stopped playing because of it. I kept getting attacked by the same guy, and I could only kill him a third of the time, and every time I did, he cheated death. By the time I stopped playing, he was immune to everything I had access to, and several things I hadn’t unlocked yet.
A friend of mine ended up getting a nemesis in Shadow of Mordor of the rather descriptively named Mumbler variety. So whenever the ork would show up, it would zoom in dramatically, he'd start pointing and waving his arms flamboyantly, while his face was slack jawed and uttering "hrrn mmm drrr hrndr".
@@Sableagle the one word, Birmingham, explains it all
I've been trying to find the video in which it was shown just how insane you could drive a Nemesis by showing us, finally, a massive ork reduced to making weird warbling noises...
I had a one that cheated death 10+ times who was lethally vulnerable to poison... and had poison weapon and possibly poison ability.
He just showed up and killed himself over and over, by the end he just crying and begging me to kill him :(
I WISH I got all these fun Nemesis encounters, but after playing it fresh off the heels of Arkham City, the combat was second nature to me, and I killed everyone I fought. Only ever died once or twice to any open world orcs, killed them if I ever met them again, and got lucky with my takedowns being permanent decapitations.
Only time I died multiple times to one captain was that one guy from the game's "challenges" who has every immunity under the sun, and can only take damage from takedowns. The one guy who should've been my nemesis, and he's an optional challenge that's incapable of being in the Nemesis system.
@@barret-xiii Sad really, the game benefits from being overwhelmed, or fumble from time to time. Though the cheat death rolls do not care about how permanent you think your decapitations are, you just got unlucky with it's rarity.
You can either let your innovations take root in the industry and have your game (and company) become a timeless source of inspiration, or cash all that in for a paltry sum before your ideas quickly get dropped down the memory hole.
Yeah sure someone will do that and then some scumbag pos company will just patent it for themselves and steal your idea
at that point isn't this practise inhuman, also i see only usa is doing these patents cause it's a shit hole nation, why not just avoid selling games in usa?
"Oh yes, lets patent the only original idea we have from Shadow of Mordor/War" said Warner brothers while ripping of Assassins Creed and Batman series
if the prince of Persia games where not ubi i would have said the same thing about 2007 assassin's creed 1 i think i remember that the idea was to make a new pop game or something like it
But the Batman series are from Warner… no?
But BATMAN is Warner Bros. So it's not ripping off.
Well Assasins Creed copied Persia games (made by the same company but still) similarly Shadow games copied Batman games, which again, mate by same company. Game mechanics should not be patented. Similar with any type of source code.
Only assets should be a subject of patent.
Yea, it realy explains why nemesis system in other games are so lackluster, they can copy the idea but not what made it work right
I feel like patenting a gameplay mechanic is like a movie company patenting a camera angle.
No kidding. This kinda thing makes me feel like we'll someday see Activision try to patent first person shooters or EA patenting loot boxes.
@@MoostachedSaiyanPrince ea Patent the loot boxes seem like a goodthing , so we never see it in other Games again.
@@zhenweilai799 Yeah, I thought of that too. The only problem is that EA would probably make even more money from this and I don't want then to make any money given what greedy bastards they are. Besides, the other publishers like Activision Blizzard would just find some kind of even more despicable workaround.
Or an art museum patenting certain brush strokes that are only found in they're paintings
It's like if Slayer patented gallop picking
You know, if Nintendo wanted, they could easily implement a sanity meter in a Luigi’s Mansion game. As Luigi gets spooked, he would slowly lose courage or whatever the bar was to represent, and if he lost all his courage he would then run back to the safe room/the last room he de-ghosted and the player would have to try the section again.
The only question is, how do you replenish the meter without necessary manually taking Luigi to a ghost-free zone each time.
Other ideas for that:
If Luigi's sanity is too low, he starts seeing hallucinated ghosts and Toads and E. Gadd start spouting nonsense.
As for how to replenish it: Capture ghosts and don't stay in the dark for too long. Or talk to friendly faces. Or maybe eat mushrooms (an unusual case where mushrooms make you SANER).
@@lunatic0verlord10 Ooh, I like that idea.
A sanity system, patented by Nintendo, used in Eternal Darkness, is now expired a month ago
@@Patfettx And there we go.
A patent that they completely wasted.
Mushrooms. Stars. Coins.
Pick a thing. Boom.
Replenishes sanity courages.
This is the episode that made me the saddest. So many ideas locked in a vault, because someone had easy access to lawyers. Humanity as a whole is worse for it.
Are they though? Also most are too specific to actually prevent ideas from being used.
just change a few scrpits and boom you found a loophole
@@niggacockball7995 Not really, all that does is provide you an
C H A N C E
of winning the court case that WILL follow, or at least avoiding a full action, because these legal departments WILL press charges, and can often win even if the case makes little sense.
And why risk it? Some small company is going to get bled absolutely dry trying to defend itself from these megacorps sending legal battle gauntlets at them for years.
Totally agree. Most of these parents are for the most obvious practical engineering solutions to the simple mechanics of game design. A patent for a rotating wheel to choose different options? FFS why not allow a patent for the wheel itself.
Yeah patents are not good. We should be able to protect the ability to use our ideas but when we stop other people from utilizing a common idea at no personal loss to ourselves everyone loses.
This is disheartening, imagine how many awesome games we could've seen using some of these mechanics. I think minigames on the loading screen is the most aggravating patent, it should be an industry standard 😂
Loading screens long enough to warrant a mini game are becoming increasingly rare with solid state drives being industry standard.
@@joshualuigi220 even more disheartening. By time people could actually make use of it technology has moved past the point where it would be helpful. So many boring ass loading screens in the past lmao
But also think again if the flooded market of carbon copies. Sum patents I feel are necessary because without a lot of these ideas would’ve been used excessively but countless companies
@@Eli-akad yeah, but one word, insulin
@@zelokorLocalGodOfChaosAndBread that has no real correlation as this is video games. I can understand why insulin shouldn’t be patented, but that’s on a different level than game mechanics
man imagine building your own game for years and then finding out that there's a random patent on a random feature
Every industry is rigged against indies like that. It's pure evil.
@@DoctorPecker the database for patents is massive, there's literally a job for sifting through them
@@DoctorPecker That's like writing a fiction story and not being allowed to use some plot point because a company wanted extra money
@@DoctorPecker "Hey we've patented reloading while running give us more money. Also we patented ledge vaulting.
We also patented entering a car from the opposite side in a first person perspective."
@@DoctorPecker "Yeah the fact that enough game features can be patented off making game development a legal nightmare isn't really a problem because I said so. Here's some vague advice that only serves to make you work harder on an already hard job."
This video should be called: 7 reasons why patented gameplay elements should be illegal
Yes. They should be beheaded.
Then again ... if you want to use a patented system you could also contact the patent holder, agree on a fair compensation for the patented feature/system and then use it. That is sort of the idea behind patents. If other companies are not willing to pay the fair compensation and thus choose not use those game systems is not the fault of patents nor of patentholders.
@@Morrodin182 these patents do not protect grand intellectual ideas. they protect ppl with too much money because they want to make even more money. locking down what other ppl can do with their games. it's a stupid ass system and not what was originally intended with patents!
@@str0m I disagree. Lets take the parallel world example from the video. The developers who came up with this innovation had to put time and money into developing this new concept. They had to work out what actually works and what not and so on. When another studio picks up this idea and 100% implements it as described in the patent in their game, they effectively could compete with the first company in an unfair way as they were able to skip a whole part of the development process and thus cost. In other words it is only fair that the company who came up with the idea is allowed to protect its intellectual property and that is what these patents are for. In no way are you as company forbidden to contact the patentholder and come to an agreement with them. In fact, this is done regularly.
IF you hold a patent AND a company contacts you AND you refuse to strike any realistic deal THEN we would be talking about something altogether BUT we are not. Anyway just my two cents on the matter.
@@Morrodin182 Not really, this is just - as mentioned before - a system to protect the ones having time and resources to submit a patent. According to your logic, pretty much every game genre in existence should be patented: rpg? patented progression/leveling up system, patented quests system; fps? patented gameplay feature where you hold a gun and are surrounded by foes trying to kill you; and so on... This is just plain stupid, and if someone wants to create a game that violates some patents and don't give a shit i'm going to buy this game, even if i don't like it, just to show them my support. Just sayin' :)
I love Jane's stumble at the end and then the "yes, that makes sense" as if to say to us "I'm not doing this take again". 😆😆😆
And that's why they call her "One Take Jane"
@@chaseteel251 is that a jake and amir reference?
@@TheChurchofJim probably. I'm referencing something. That guess is as good as any other.
@BalkanBeast if you're implying something lewd, I believe you're confusing this with "One Pump Chump."
At this point our intellectual property system either needs to be abolished or rewritten from the ground up
There should at least be a law that prohibits you from patenting a rather vague system (that could be used in such a diverse variety of different ways) if you NEVER USE IT EVER AGAIN
*cough* _Warner Bros_ *cough*
Yep... that graphical interface one from Mass Effect is insanely generic.
Theres a long history of patents that aren't for protecting unique ideas... but for grabbing hold of something obvious that anyone else would have thought of.
@@theenigma2861 like how Fox had to make a fantastic 4 movie every so often or the rights would revert to Marvel, which was basically the only reason for Fant4stic
Patents protect smaller companies from being taken advantage of by large companies that could copy them and undersell them. It also promotes innovation in most things
@@ethanlappin Yes but not if it comes out with something ike Fant4stic
The chicken sunglasses are actually really important.
Chickens go a bit insane at the sight of blood, and they attack and kill other chickens that are injured and bleeding for whatever reason.(which happens a lot more than you would think. Remember they have super sharp talons.)
The red tinted sunglasses will make it so that everything they see is a tinge of red, and they don't notice blood, which stops them from killing the other chickens.
Chickens would so be extinct if not for us.
@@ToxicBastard it's so farmers don't lose a significant amount of there livestock because they're killing each other for no reason.
One chicken gets attacked by a raccoon or something, but gets away, and then every other chicken attacks it and kills it, and those chickens get injured and started bleeding in the process, and it just snowballs from there. If a farm has 1000 chickens and this sort of brawl breaks out, they could lose literally hundreds of chickens from it.
@@ToxicBastard Chickens were _created_ by humans out of wild jungle fowl. Wild jungle fowl do not cram themselves in cheek by jowl in enclosed spaces voluntarily. There is no charity here, so don't sneer at the chickens. Sneer at the mentality that made them in the first place instead.
@@LaikaLycanthrope apparently in can occur even if chickens are not kept in cramped conditions. This awesome comment inspired me to do my own research: free range and barn chickens have the lowest rates of cannibalism but it still happens,
@@CreativeUsernameEh yeah, the kill instinct isn't man's creation. It's expressed more in dense farms, but that's due to population density.
Bloober Team filing a patent is hilarious considering how much they blatantly steal from everyone else.
Looks like they patented the only original thing in their games.
literally disgusting, the entire game is a poorly executed ripoff of silent hill and then they dare file a fucking pattent por the only """original""" component of the game
Yeah titianfall 2 did the same thing 5 years ago with that level where you could switch between the past and present with a button press
@@blizzardgaming7070 Not the same thing. Other games did that too years before Titanfall, like Dishonored. The way The Medium does it was unique, like playing 2 games at once while other games shifted between the 2 places.
i can’t think of the games rn, but i’ve definitely played games before where you control two characters at once in different realities, and they were older games than that game. But yeah Titanfall 2 is not an example of it because that’s one character you’re controlling shifting between realities.
Please god let Warner Bros implement the nemesis system in a Batman game. Would be great to have unique and weird new villians popping up for batman
I'll pass. The Nemesis system had its merits, but it's incredibly frustrating to repeatedly kill one of the orc bosses and get screwed over by the RNG, because the game has just decided this one orc should be allowed to cheat death indefinitely. Under these circumstances you can find yourself facing a ridiculously overpowered boss that is inexplicably immune to all the straightforward methods of dispatching enemies, and also gains even more power each time it unfairly curb-stomps you.
@@Mister_Vyar
No boss/Captain/Warchief/Overlord is as ridiculous as you describe it to be. Seems like you’re just talking trash for no reason.
@@AmorphousGoob in Diablo, it could absolutely get that bad
@@brandondriver99
That could be said for any game, but SoW creates a good balance of keeping the player godlike but also vulnerable on the hardest mode in my opinion. If Diablo gets like uber ridiculous then I think that means it’s game design is flawed. Never played Diablo though so I don’t know.
@@AmorphousGoob it's part of the game. Random shit happens
The idea of a patent is that a product is protected and you can profit from it, but some of these don't protect products, but small aspects of products.
Mass Effect as an IP isn't hurt if another game had dialogue wheels, but other games would benefit from it. Games borrowing from predecessors is a big part of how games evolve.
I mean, can you imagine if early metal bands copyrighted palm-muted tremolo picking so no other band could do it for 20 years?
Well AT LEAST the patent rights only last a few years and not like copyrights which last decades after the author's death even.
It's evidence of the industry and law being rigged.
Man the Nemesis systems patent still makes me mad. The Shadow of Mordor games were ripping off so many games and yet they patent their only original idea
Me too it would have been great for the arkham city and knight
Or for Spiderman games
That's why I'm never buying a Mordor game ever again. Only bought the first one, now they can suck it.
@@TheKayech Batman Arkham is Warner bros property, it could still happen.
@@CaptainDecimus totally forgot that was theirs. But nah arkham series is over now. Maybe if they do a new batman game they might use it.
@@TheKayech considering that Batman and Spider-Man have established rogues galleries with established backstories I don’t know that a system for randomly generating enemies with unique personalities would really work. Surely it would undermine the established lore.
Imagine living in a society where you're taught that competition is the primary driver of innovation, and then hearing about this
Competition is the primary driver of innovation… And a lot of people don’t like competition or innovation.
Imagine if Id Software had patented First Person Shooter mechanics 😆
We probably wouldn't talk about First Person Shooter today.
@@HalfpennyTerwilliger more likely the patent wouldn't be valid. They didn't make the first, not really.
@@marhawkman303 I don't think you need to be the first to make it, maybe back then, but definitely not now. Even back then, whoever first made it would have to prove they were the first when someone attempts to patent it or has it, which opens the possibility of getting away with it because the inventor doesn't have proof or isn't saying anything
@@marhawkman303 You don't have to be the first to make something to patent it. You just have to be the first person to file for the patent.
And expired in 2021.
The only one of these that was actually worthy of a patent was the D-pad. That was an actual physical thing.
Everything else is just game mechanics.
not only that but the D-pad patent was specific enough to actually provoke the innovation that followed like sega genesis' 8 way pad which proved superior for inputting angle directions for example in games like mortal combat, meanwhile these game mechanics patents are built off stolen ideas as is and are far more likely to cause stagnation then innovation imo.
@@BobSmith-ly7fz exactly. That was what patents were for. To create innovation. Imagine a Sony PlayStation 1 with just a cross D-Pad. The specific enough nature of Nintendo’s patent allowed innovation in design and function.
The disguise system in Hitman is also patented, or was at some point... or something about Hitman's mechanics were at one point. I remember in the early 2000's there was supposed to be an open-world assassination based game that took place in some kind of futuristic city, and the main premise was you were an assassin or gun for hire that went around the city to kill various targets in various ways... but ioi Interactive or maybe Eidos at the time sued them for infringement and it canned development D=
Seems somewhat scummy as the concept of a disguise shouldn’t be patented, I mean the amount of games that have stealth and disguise like stuff is fair bit, such as Outer Worlds and Destroy all Humans. Not directly called disguise per say but still.
The frick ? That's such a broad concept... Assassination and disguise go hand in hand. God whoever accepts those patents are just morons who don't do 2 bits of research aren't they...
U talking about prey the og one that got canceled?
@@devilblackdeath Someone in Australia successfully patented swinging on a swing including a side to side motion to ascribe a circular path. They did it to show how dumb patent law is. By design:
1) Patent lawyers accept patent filings based on the idea that if they were unpatentable, the courts would sort them out.
2) Courts accept patent claims based on the idea that if they were unpatentable, the patent office would have rejected it.
@@markhackett2302 So they're all lazy hoping the other one won't be lazy. Seems like a sound system :S Then again we're talking about the animal race that was able to invent the concept of stock market so yeah...
Imagine playing something called Insane Mario Kart and you’re racing a player who’s gone insane and they’re swerving all over the place because they’re hallucinating banana peels
"Going bananas"... literally and figuratively.
And let's add the medium split screen for a real taxi driver who's going insane and hallucinating everything is a Mario kart world
I mean that sounds like fun-
@@martinescorcia3978 And the player has to figure out which screen is the real one to avoid obstacles. Also it can change during the level.
Makes me think of the effects of the Spy's hallucination grenades in Team Fortress Classic.
Shadow of war and shadow of mordor with the nemesis system and their systems for spies and such stuff had a great potential for personal revenge stories and conspiracies within the orc society. The games gave those orcs their own personality.
Similar system could have been put to use in a lot of setting.
One could imagine a prohibition style story with the system taking care of mob bosses and their underlings rise to power as you take down characters in the organisation.
Same with pirate flotillas, feudal kingdoms, etc.
Any organised hierarchical social system really.
@@HalfpennyTerwilliger
It could be used everywhere.
It's in motion and you're never save. Those things and the little, individual stories of a single person made it so great.
@@DerFauleHund hell Warner bros could make a dc super hero game with the idea of criminals breaking free and getting better
@@HalfpennyTerwilliger Similar things DO exist. The patent's pretty narrow actually. It wasn't a new idea patented, but a new variation of an old idea.
The Nemesis System needs another chance to shine, so brilliant
It was just a RNG system.
Orc body type A with name list B, weakness 1, 5, and 6, strength 2, 4, and 7.
If you died, new roll of the RNG. And pick from set of pre recorded dialogues.
Honestly it was way more annoying you couldn’t skip the speeches than the Nemesis system was even worth.
@@Ceece20 Tbh, ain't that the whole problem with "Nemesis System Patent" at the very core of it, it basically a Tweaked RNG System, and yet they fucking Patented it, like what the fuck do you even discover? this is not even like "Who is the Inventor of Bulb" kind of shit, this is was like what if EA Patented Simracing and Arcade Racing Mechanic in favor of "Saving" the NFS Franchise.
@@Azazantei this is true. I fucking hate companies trying to patent game mechanics.
Only one on this list that was actually worthy of being patented was the D-pad. That was an actual thing at least, and it left enough room for people to get around it.
@@Ceece20 And video games are just 1s and 0s.
@@Ceece20 Which kinda makes it pointless, way to hold a strong patent. Though I shutter to think what the industry would have looked had it been harder to get around.
whenever you want a dialogue wheel in a game, instead do a dialogue square
There's a Nintendo game franchise that already exists, has Mario characters in it and could very well use a sanity meter: Luigi's Mansion. Why they didn't incorporate one into the series after they got the patent for sanity meters is beyond me.
That was my first thought as well, and they could have made it very simple if they felt it was too intense for their intended audience. Just have ghost free rooms for him to calm down and recover in, and difficulty settings to make it more challenging for older players.
I knew that products could be patented but it's crazy to see systems/ideas patented. There should at least be a condition of continuous use/production of said product/system/idea with a termination of patent if not accounted for.
I once had a roommate who could've gone by Dûsh Who Devours. Definitely a nemesis of mine.
Clean out your fridge kind of guy?
Erase your comment or I'm calling Warner Bros! 😉
Reminds me of a nemesis of mine named "Dûsh the Massive"
@@noaht3087 Wouldn't he want that on his nemesis?
The nemesis system is one of the best parts of any game ever. Unbelievably genius and very well executed. What great time with both of those games. They need to make another game with the nemesis system
They never will, because no-one else can so there's no reason to ever compete with it. The only game they would grab sales from would be the ones they published earlier. Patents like this are a complete farce.
I’ll never forget in Shadow of Mordor when I lost like 4 times to a guy named Zangdush (Zang-douche). I finally beat him but then at the end when they revive the toughest orca you faced everyone was chanting “Zang-douche”, “Zang-douche” and I started flipping out.
"And no, we can't check dental records. There's no head."🤣🤣🤣 Genuinely laughed out loud. Way to casually stick the boot in there man. "We've showed you gruesome images. Now imagine there's no head. Do you want to hear about the entrails too?"🤣🤣🤣. It's been a long day.
That line delivery was awesome. 🤣
Just another thing that made Eternal Darkness so good.
So no head?
The intrails have become outtrails?
I can't believe I don't even remember that bit of Eternal Darkness.
This list is basically "we made a cool mechanic idea, but we arent sure if the game itself is as cool as the mechanic. Let's patent it so we doesnt have to deal with competitors who could perfected the idea or make it better than our game"
Wow, the Nemesis System.
When I first started Shadow of Mordor, I jumper off the starting tower and was unceremoniously and immediately killed by a nearby orch, about five or six times in a row (dual wielding, poisoned weapons, poison boost. Just a WHOLE LOT of bad luck on my part). What I didn’t know then was that every time I died, that same bloody orch got promoted, and received stat boosts. He wound up being the absolute bane of my existence throughout the entire game. Even the endgame boss was a cakewalk in comparison.
Wow, this makes me furious. Imagine what cool games we already could have played if those publishers/ inventors weren't so greedy
100% agree, although I wonder how many (if any) innovations we appreciate today were created as an alternative to not being able to access patented mechanics or gameplay.
@@michaelrosenbaum4822 Most likely none since all of those things would have been built if they were going to build them anyway. There's also a huge first mover advantage so these patents really only prevent people who were developing something similar from building it.
Companies do this with like scientific/medical advances too.
I am stunned that NAMCO managed to get a patent on loading games in 1995 since many of the games in the 80s had similar things, an indie company called Llamasoft made many of their games for the Commodore 64 with this in place
Well, this has been a thoroughly infuriating look at corpo greed.
Good news is that people just like you can sit on patent cases.
to you perhaps, but to me it was Tuesday.
I hate when companies patent game mechanics. It's just stupid. Also, imitation is the greatest form of flattery.
The full quote is, “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery that mediocrity can pay to greatness.” This pretty much means that a crappy game could be good by blatantly copying a better game. It has nothing to do with paying homage to a game that 'inspired' them.
@@jardex2275 that quote is so wrong on so many levels it's hard to even begin pointing them out. Maybe that's why it's used without the second, really wrong half.
@@jardex2275 imitation its the whole reason you can use a computer and watch this videos nowadays. Be grateful
Could you imagine the kind of game we would get if all dev teams came together to make 1 game with each team contribution to it
You're really close to asking the right question: Could you imagine what would happen if all humanity got together to make a functioning, humane global society?
Hopefully EA wouldn't be involved
@@mindlesscheeseburger I agree!
If every dev team worked together on one project, it'd be a buggy mess. Different companies work in different engines, render using different software, and have different preferences towards genre and art style.
Plus many stories of games with multiple dev teams do not have happy endings. Oh hi, Aliens: Colonial Marines!
Yeah, I can easily image the mess this would be. Imagine having at least 5 bosses that you have to get to sign off on something to do a single thing at work, then trying to figure out which boss is the most important one in this single task so you can get the details right and hope the other four don't get upset about it. Even if you removed the redundant overhead this is the type of nightmare attempting to make a game like that would be. IF the game was completed, it would be a very terrible game. Most people don't know this, but collaborating gets harder the more people you add to it, not easier, because getting humans to cooperate is like herding cats, even if they all want the same thing. The reason it's done is because it usually speeds up the process, so a dev can release more than one or two big games in their lifetime. Having a functional game release is a miracle every time.
Bloober team: Let’s patent rendering of two parallel game worlds
Me using two viewports in blender: Shit
Wait hold up, how could anyone get away with patenting a sanity meter? Tabletop's had those since at least the '80s.
Also, thank you for calling out that that's not how mental health actually works! Pet peeve of mine, that.
"Wait hold up, how could anyone get away with patenting a sanity meter?"
Nearly every single software patent ever filed, with very few exceptions, is something that already existed in the public domain but with "... on a COMPUTER!!!!" tacked on at the end.
@@kidanhone6048 Isn't it, though? Sure, there's no numbers, but if I stab someone enough times, they die. If I run for a long time, I get tired. Those are 1:1 correlations. But there isn't anything that will make you "go crazy" if you're exposed to it too often. Brains don't work that way.
(Moreover, there isn't societal stigma against bleeding to death like there is with mental illness, but that's a different discussion.)
The dual reality pattent is BS. I remember playing Double Trpuble on the Apple II+. If the idea was used in the 80s, making a pattent for it now is a bit of a stretch.
This hits different after the Palworld lawsuit.
I like how no company that filed for the patent has capitalized on said patent.
Using it for one or 2 games and then tossing the concept letting it collect dust until the patent expires.
Oh yeah, all they're hoping for with this bull is that some other company will give them an easy way to make more money.
This is why we can´t have nice things... :/
Pretty much this. It's also a shame that we can't dislike the horrible behaviour and/or topics through UA-cam. It's not the video itself that's bad but I'd still like to dislike these games companies for things that are essentially quality of life gaming improvements.
@@MorinehtarTheBlue Your dislikes are literally useless. They exist purely for weak catharsis. If you dislike it so much, just spit on a Warner Bros. logo or something, it'll accomplish more.
@@MorinehtarTheBlue Well he is not wrong, youtube is even thinking about removing dislikes alltogether because they don't want political stuff that is in line with their agenda to be downvoted. At this point spitting at the youtube and warnerbrothers logo might actually accomplish more.
@@mariusacripina8192 My point was that he was being an asshole whether he realized it or not. You don't have to be wrong to be in the wrong.
@@MorinehtarTheBlue Seems like an overaction. His comment might have been rude but definitely not rude enough to warrant you calling him an asshole for stating a fact.
This feature of patent should be tarnished for eternity especially for gaming possible outside of the industry
I'm so grateful Rocksteady didn't patent the free-flow combat in the Arkham games.
So are the developers of the Middle Earth: Shadow games.
I don't know man... part of me wishes that they should've.
@@lnsflare1 Aren't they both owned by Warner Bros?
@@Kjf365 You know what, that's a fair point.
@@Kjf365 Yeah, but we've seen other games implement similar systems, like Sleeping Dogs and Spider-Man PS4.
I LOVE that the nemesis system remembers your battles, and the enemies will gain different stats and even skins (scars, etc.) depending on your interactions with them in the past
Sooo what exactly did they patent? NPCs with stats and memory? How would you even patent this since it's been done before anyway
Snafu? As in Situation Normal: All F'ed Up?
Best orc name ever.
I think you are wrong but I want you to be right I don't speak orc sadly.
Ah, but the diacritic means it's not English. Nope, it's totally fantasy. ;)
It's almost as good as getting one named Fubar or Dush.
Imagine a horror game with a nice calm mini game for loading screens- and it also serves as a break checkpoint! So one the games done loading, you can choose to keep playing the mini game if you so choose!
Or, once you're in the zone, and are close to the high score, they jumpscare you.
wc patent for nemesis was a sad day. what could have been a growth in ai across the industry was cauterized before it could even happen. guess we can just buckle in for prettier zombies
Or we can make a system that's just plain better. :V One thing about the nemesis system is that it's VERY player and combative focused. Some quick alterations would be to make it (a) also work with the AI in general (Yes the nemesis system also have rivaries, but that's nowhere as complex as the rivaries they have with the player), (b) implement biases such that even within the confines of the system they would still have their own quirks that influences relationships, (c) implement indirect influence (like everyone immediately hating you if you used a nuke, regardless of who you used it on), and (d) implement such systems on more than just combat, like trading and etc. You might notice that a lot of these improvements already exist in some form or another in 4x games.
I mean, how did they get a patent on dialogue wheels when they don't appear to be substantively different from pre-existing wheel-based menus in video games, like the now ubiquitous shortcut/inventory wheels, or the even older combat menus in multiple turn based JRPGs?
I imagine the people responsible for approving these stupid, stupid patents are not much for gaming.
@@bleh329 Been working in a national patent office, and... you always know when they're reaching. Problem is, if their legal team finds an angle and can make an argument for how their application is in conformity with IP law in you country, no matter how blatant the bad faith is, you usually have to grant them the patent.
@@AcuteGoblinitis Is there any way for the general public to petition a patent court to overturn a patent by pointing out that is not an original idea?
@@lnsflare1 Depends on where you live and where the patent application was filed... there are some places where the public can oppose a patent while it's still under review*, after that, if the patent has been delivered it becomes a whole lot more complicated.
*caveat: there is a limited time to do this, usually a few months, so unless you are working for the legal team of a competitor, and frequently and closely survey what's new in patent law, you'll probably miss it.
The delivery of "look at you, look at me, here we are, we made it..." just cracked me up. Really that whole outro was fun. The video was good too.
Imagine if someone patented the idea of the game scoring you a numerical value based on how you interact with objects in the game
right?
We stand on the shoulders of giants... if the giants let us up there, that is
Interesting how dual reality system was there in Prince of Persia- warrior within, much before Medium and they didnt patent it
it's not just about dual reality or coexisting, it's about existing, controlling, and displaying both at the same time, using split screen.
Namco loading screen mini game still pisses me off, seriously these kinds of patent that could improve gaming as a whole shouldn't be patented.
Fortunately that one finally expired.
Yeah thank god, but imagine if it never patented in the first place, there so many games could use that in the past when loading screen is common.
Now days, loading screen is pretty much nonexist thanks to SSD so the concept is practically useless.
Seems like these patents do more to stifle innovation than actually protect their licences. Some are so broard it's ludicrous.
It made me wonder how industry savvy patent reviewers have to be. Things that sound horribly general to gamers may sound sensibly specific to those only barely knowledgeable of the modern pastime.
@@patrickmccurry1563 the fact that someone was able to patent the very concept of a minigame in a loading screen goes to show how little they clearly know. It doesn't sound like it was just a specific mini game or the technology around that but rather the whole concept. That's crazy.
The odd thing is, there was a nemesis system in Champions Online, which came out 5 years before.
Sanity meter, oh, you mean like Call of Cthulhu? Steal something from another game, and patent it, how sleazy can you get?
I wonder if the Simpsons using a hand instead of an arrow would’ve held up as a defense.
or the fact that the entire patent is stupid. it's just combining things other games already did. directional arrows are as old as 3d gaming, many racing games included pedestrians that would jump out of the way when the car came at them...and open world driving games were far from a new concept...hell I think carmegeddon had all of those features now that I think about it.
Alternative title: "Why being able to patent game mechanics is dumb shit."
Imagine someone had patented playing with other people via the internet.
Or having open worlds.
Though the later might've been a blessing in disguise, considering how many horribly mediocre open world games there are.
considering if people don't try to make it good or aren't experienced with making it good, it's obviously gonna be mediocre
I just wanted to comment that somebody should have patented open worlds, but it seems you got it before me, oh well.
More shit like Witcher 2 not Skyrim is my wish.
@@Terrgore Bethesda would have had a far better shot at patenting it than CD Project, and it would have run out anyway since then.
@@DatAlien i think I wasn't clear in what I said. What I meant is that I want more open area games like Witcher 2, and less open world games like Skyrim. Excuse me for the misunderstanding.
Only USA allows such crappy patenting. None of these patents were filed and granted outside USA.
So the guys that patent their "dual character control" so nobody else can use it are the same that RIPPED OFF Super Pang. Great.
Scalping will have a whole different meaning when the BrainStation5 releases...
Game developers:
*build their games on the basis of ideas, concepts and gameplay mechanics that have been around before
Also game developers:
NOONE USE THIS GAMEPLAY MECHANIC THIS IS MINE
somehow people keep seeming to forget that dishonored 2 had a dual reality mission and it was by far the best executed one i have ever seen, no you dont have split screen, but you carry around a mirror thingy in your hand which shows you the other word which it is totally also rendered simultaneously, enemies walking around n shit and things you change in one effect the other. why are the sealing it like that is a big achievement for their game...
Video game patents are even more BS than software patents. Patents are a trade of short term exclusivity to get the individual/company making something to explain exactly how it works so in the future it can be innovated on instead of being kept a secret.
If someone can easily figure out how a game mechanic would be implemented just by a look at the end product, it shouldn't be patentable. There's no value in trading the lost innovation for an explanation of something obvious.
And in the games industry 20 years is not short term. I'd say no more than the dev cycle of 2 games is reasonable.
This is why intuitively is so rare in gaming, because any time something interesting is done the one who does it almost always hoards it all to themselves.
It does seem slightly strange that some of this is possible as within U.S. board game design law, you can't patent a rule, even a new one like tapping a card in Magic the Gathering. Yes, they tried and the answer was that anybody else could tap cards in their game, they just couldn't call it tapping. This suggests that a nemesis system for example, is not a game rule in which case, what the blazes is it?
You can't copyright game mechanics. Patents are another storz
Jane was * this * close to becoming an Old Spice ad.
Look at me, look at you, now back at me. here's a copy of that game you like, look over there, now back to me, it has become a patent. I'm riding a lawyer. Old Spice.
Nemesis system should be released to all game developers for free
I wonder if Rocksteady regrets not patenting their “attack in rhythm” Arkham combat system?
Financially, maybe. Artistically, no as by allowing others to use the system it allows others innovate and improve the system. Plus if your implementation of the system is actually good, you shouldn't need to feel threatened enough to patent it. Hence why the Arkham games are still one of the best examples of it despite alot of games taking a stab at it.
It wasn't anything innovative, attack in rhythm was already used in other games, like wither 1, and possibly many others.
Imagine if Beethoven patented his Fifth Symphony. Music would be entirely different nowadays with how many musicians took inspiration from that iconic piece of music.
I don't know, a sanity meter would work quite well in a particularly gritty instalment of Luigi's Mansion
Gotta say, I'm pretty glad 2 is patented. Would hate for that dialogue options type to become the industry standard.
Yeah, the dialogue wheel fucking sucks
I had a CDI and im pretty sure that Phil Hartman commercial is the only reason my dad purchased it.
Bethesda _kind of_ went around BioWare's patent with fallout 4's speech "square": Up for additional information, down to quit interaction, left for sarcasm, and right to continue. During a Speech Check, these would be: Up for Medium difficulty, down to quit interaction, left for Hard difficulty and right to pass the Speech Check, losing the rewards.
When attempting to disencourage someone out of something, the options would be listed as: Up to persuade, down to quit interaction, left to bribe and right to threat.
These patents stifle creativity and innovation.
eh, sometimes.
but i'd argue blatantly ripping off another game's mechanics isn't exactly utilizing 'creativity and innovation'.
can we do more with these concepts, sure. would we want these concepts to be 'limited' in this fashion, not really.
but at the same time, it's not exactly creative for an open world game to have you climbing some fucking thing to show off the map, just because ubisoft wants to cram that down the throat of every gamer. duplicating something that's already been done isn't really what i'd call 'innovative'.
@@leeman27534 there should really be some rule that stops companies from patenting ideas that already existed (ex. dual screen singleplayer, even if less developed as well as something that stops companies from using patents they aren't using at all (ex. the nemesis system).
Or patenting ideas they weren't using or trying to patent a very broad concept.
@@justas423 wasn't exactly arguing for or against patents, my guy.
merely, patents locking away some very specific things doesn't really 'stifle creativity and innovation' that much, if you essentially had to rip someone else's idea off 99%...
@@leeman27534 You act like 100 people don't have the same idea all the time. Stopping someone who is working at a small independent game company who doesn't have a team of lawyers from possibly making a better version of something that they started working on earlier from doing it doesn't help anyone.
The solution is to change how patents work. Ditch the monopoly and replace it with a prize. Come up with something useful and get a one-time prize of 100 years' worth of GDP Per Capita. That'd set you up for life and everyone else can make use of your invention.
You all remember that time Samuel Morse tried to patent electro-magnetism? That's what these patents all remind me of.
I enjoy how completely improvised Jane's outro felt in this one...is that a new format? If so, keep it!
Not enough people are taking the piss out of Bioware for misspelling "piece" in their patent application 😆
I want a mini-game loading screen in Borderlands where you get to try to shoot Claptrap and get points and he complains when you hit him.
i want an entire dlc area based on that.
actually, we got that. i've got like 14 bl3 characters, most of them gotten from level 30 to like level 50, 55, 62, 70, whatever, from murdering a metric fuckton of claptraps.
Do any of the Borderlands games have a Claptrap player character? Like claptrap riding on another robot or something? That should be a thing. Or even be a giant claptrap tank.
@@plasmaoctopus1728 yeah. TPS one of the vault hunters IS claptrap.