Are Video Game Patents Ruining the Industry? | Design Delve

I've written this before on a GMTK video but it keeps irking me: Patents and licenses don't primarily exist to lock down some IP but to preserve the economic value that's gone into them for further use. Yes, it's exclusive - but it's also tradable. For some, this is the whole point. So what confuses me about e.g. the Nemesis system is not that it hasn't really been used by the patent-owner but that it apparently also hasn't been licensed out for use in other games... Sure, that's nothing a small indie developer could afford - but a large studio?! There must be something about the games-as-a-business mindset I'm missing here...

Thank you for this video! You've touched on a number of meaningful issues. Something that often gets lost in IP discourse is that IP laws, including both copyright for creative works and patents for inventions, serve two purposes. First, they incentivize the production of intellectual work by granting the creators exclusive use of those works for a limited time. Second, they expire, allowing all works to eventually flow into the public domain. That expiration is very important, because while inventors and original authors deserve to benefit from their labor, society benefits from a rich public domain. If a patent only expires after its no longer useful, as was the case with the loading screen game patent, then that patent's term is too long. But what's the fix to this? There's a lot of interesting options available, but I doubt we'll see the political will to implement them any time soon.

There’s a UK trademark case where it was found that Sky (the telecommunications company) had been copywriting any conceivable word that could be paired with it on the off chance someone else might use it. It was held that as they had no intention of using the term that the defending company was using that they couldn’t hold the trademark. I wonder how this would translate to patents (though obviously this was a UK case so who knows how a US court would have decided that case).

Very interesting video, thanks jm8!

The greatest danger with game/software patents is not that implementing an idea is blocked. It's that there are so many of them, and they are all worded to be as broad as a patent examiner will accept but no broader. As such, a person can implement an idea they think is original only to be sued and later be forced to withdraw the game. I don't think anyone working in software or even software-adjacent fields thinks software patents are a good idea, mainly for this reason. If there is only way to achieve a particular end in software, it's essentially unpatentable, but proving this in court is expensive and time-consuming. The other issue is that the term of patents (about twenty years, depending on location) is fairly short for fields with a relatively slow pace of innovation, but glacially slow for the software field where five years is sufficient for immense disruption. Five years ago, large language models were barely a thing; ChatGPT only hit the market in late 2022. Think where AI would be today if Google's seminal paper "Attention is all you Need" had been patented. Patents are intended to encourage and reward innovation, but software patents tend to do the reverse. They only provide barriers by forcing people to find awkward alternatives to obvious solutions.