New Nintendo patent could banish summons in FFXIV

[Kandraxx]

Nintendo is the kinda company that would sue a 10-year old kid for all he will ever own.

[Manamaru]

They'll only do this to bully indie companies, and they've been getting much more aggressive since Palworld got received positively. Corporate butthurt for a company as old and big as Nintendo is just pathetic.

What nintendo is engaging in is aggressively petty patent trolling. Patents, especially in video games is not only greedy in of itself, but also insanely reductive in allowing the games industry to innovate and continue evolving in their systems and mechanics. It's peal clutching.

For some insight, there used to be a patent for Mini games in loading screen that only expired back in 2015. Bandai Namco had that patent since 1995. Warner Bros and their defunct gaming studio hold a patent for the Nemesis system that was used in the Shadow of Mordor games. Nintendo has aggressively patented not only summoning monsters to fight for you, but also the concept of throwing an object to capture a monster from a 3rd person view, as well as mounting a creature that you summoned and achieving flight with it.

Insanely broad and overreaching patents that serve nothing to be a stifle to any sort of creative innovation for any upcoming upstart. Some may point the finger and say Palworld should've just given up; however I say this was something Nintendo would've done as petty as it is and knowing how badly the quality has gone down on their Pokemon games. A reminder that the entire two's suit they're involved with isn't over IP, but over patents; something that is going to be a very lengthy suit before any actual answer comes down to whether the patents Nintendo is using in their suit hold any weight or not. If it does, then all indie and other games are at the mercy of the whims of their aggressively litigious and trigger happy lawyers and execs. Nintendo doesn't even deserve those egregious troll patents, and they deserve to be challenged; but since it'd not only be extremely expensive but also take a very long time, we probably won't see any challenge any time soon.

[Zelda206]

What Nintendo is doing is stepping on so many companies and inventions that I think most of these "peers" (corporations other than Nintendo) are waiting simply for the opportunity to arrive to take the company apart after it's wasted its resources trying to put a lid on creation and innovation. They've taken over two years to attempt their submissive tactic and have almost nothing to go with, and what they currently have hasn't stopped their competition; if anything it's fueled the fire and encouraged more to create in spite of what Nintendo's patents claim are theirs simply because evidence in court would prove Nintendo cannot claim what was invented before them by other bodies. Even if we can't see anything, I would imagine there's a lot of activity going on. Only time will tell.

A calm sky doesn't beget a clear forecast.

[CaptainLagbeard]

Their patent for using summoned creatures to fight is something that likely wouldn't really stand any kind of legal case, especially outside of Japan.

They're not the first ones to come up with the concept, and there's other big series that use the idea... Final Fantasy with it's summons being one prominent example, and also there's the entire Megami Tensei franchise from Atlus.
So unless they start fighting a whole bunch of companies to defend their patent, it's probably not going to hold.

[Daralii]

Their patent for using summoned creatures to fight is something that likely wouldn't really stand any kind of legal case, especially outside of Japan.

They're not the first ones to come up with the concept, and there's other big series that use the idea... Final Fantasy with it's summons being one prominent example, and also there's the entire Megami Tensei franchise from Atlus.
So unless they start fighting a whole bunch of companies to defend their patent, it's probably not going to hold.

The original SMT also came out 4 years before Pokemon Red/Green in Japan(1992 vs 1996).

[VeyaAkemi]

The original SMT also came out 4 years before Pokemon Red/Green in Japan(1992 vs 1996).

Not just that, but SMT is actually a spinoff of an even older game called Megami Tensei, coming out in 1987, not just that, but MegaTen is considered to be the oldest example of the monster collectible/"mons" genre, which things like Pokemon, Digimon, Palworld, and even its children SMT and Persona belong to.

It's honestly always very amusing to me to think how Pokemon and SMT are, objectively, part of the same genre as monster collector JRPGs, considering how... penile SMT can be, with the most obvious example of Mara but also Incubus still showing up in the modern games.

[Elephantality]

Their patent for using summoned creatures to fight is something that likely wouldn't really stand any kind of legal case, especially outside of Japan.

They're not the first ones to come up with the concept, and there's other big series that use the idea... Final Fantasy with it's summons being one prominent example, and also there's the entire Megami Tensei franchise from Atlus.
So unless they start fighting a whole bunch of companies to defend their patent, it's probably not going to hold.

Yes, a big whopping L for Nintendo here.

[RedLolly]

I still haven't heard a compelling argument for patents as a concept existing at all. They just seem to stifle innovation for the sake of profit.

The initial idea was so a creator could properly profit off of their ideas and not worry about it being stolen. Patents initially only lasted 40 years (so a good adult life's worth of possibilities to make your idea into something), and then would become public domain, but Disney made some moves to extend them and tweak copyright laws so that they last 100 years or indefinitely.

The initial concept was good, actually.

[BlisteringFrost]

Legally a patent can't apply retroactively so SE will be fine.

Just because Nintendo says they patented it doesn't mean the courts will accept it anyways.

[RedLolly]

I think we need to consider the context that Japan fully supports Nintendo over Pocketpair and want the violent knockoff taken out, while it's the complete opposite over here, with Pocketpair being a creative indie darling taking on and innovating over a stale franchise.