A patent in itself means absolutely nothing if it cannot be enforced by law and this seems like it'd be a very tough one to prove.
Look at plagiarism regarding songs, for example. Even when it's obvious to anyone who'd listen that a bass line or a pattern or melody is virtually similar, it's almost impossible to get a ruling, let alone to get the case heard in the first place.
Judges are usually reluctant to limit creativity and when technology is involved, good luck explaining to anyone not in the business how one thing is "so similar" to the other it can only have been copied from it.
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I realize WB is a big company but even with a lot of lawyers, they still need to case to go to court to take people to court.
The number of patent litigation going to court is extremely low in the US and the success rate is in the low 20%. So even if the goal was to railroad smaller game creators into settling, it'd still be a tough job unless they scare real easy.
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And extremely hard to enforce. Companies that even patent stuff anymore, it's usually just a dick contest of some kind with a competitor or a pre-emptive strike to scare some fired employees not to use the technologies they developed while employed there.
It's still stupid but I doubt it's a game changer in the gaming industry.
Time will tell I guess.
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this is just another symptom.
in 1995, Namco filed a patent on the use of “auxillary mini-games” in loading screens
if it wasnt for them we all could of been playing pong wile waiting for a game to load. now the patent is expired and we can play mini games wile waiting for our solid state drives to load...
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So apparently Warner Bros has now patented how NPCs in their games work, despite the fact that they've done nothing but copy pre-existing ideas. Here's a video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_UO5Ll3OAd0
This looks really bad to me, like potentially industry-destroying bad. If this patent isn't thrown out, and other large companies start doing the same, it could mean no one is able to create anything anymore without licensing gameplay concepts / ideas first.
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