To be clear, like I say, I'm definitely against this in principle. I'm just saying the people I'm seeing going "RIP Persona" are perhaps overreacting, because this isn't a case of Nintendo wiping out that mechanic in every other game going forwards. This is a (bullshit) strategy to win one lawsuit
Nintendo would never go after Persona, Digimon etc bc they are established for 30 years (and given Pokemon only predates Persona by 6mos, it's obvious it was not a rip). But would a smaller dev chance it on a Persona-like now? is it worth the risk?
This is how legislation and trademark camping like this stifles creativity simply by existing. Yes, Nintendo probably won't legislate on 9 out of 10 cases (or whatever). But would you bet your company, your livelihood, your career, bankruptcy on being the 1 in 10? No, so you just don't go there.
A case in point on this is Bandai's 'Loading Screen Mini Game' patent was extremely loose & vague, there was wriggle room around it, but nobody else wanted to remotely risk it so nobody ever did those
I take your point. I still think it's enough of an established mechanic now that I don't see it ever being enforced beyond the Palworld case, but I do get some devs will pause when considering it. There are doubtless countless other patents like that too which haven't been pointed out in the media
Loading screen mini games? They're old as hell 😂 Do you guys remember Invaderload on the C64? Basically a space invaders clone whilst the game loaded 😎
Yeah - Namco Bandai registered a patent covering a specific implementation of delivering minigames while game content loaded _from optical discs_ in 1995.
I see... Not cassettes from the 80's then 😂😂
Ha! No, they would be OK - and even when the patent expired in 2015, consoles were stashing a lot more of the game on local storage, preloading etc, so there was a lot less waiting time in general - and now we have games which are never put on an optical disc at all, or the disc just authenticates.
(The patent talks about a recording medium but uses a CD-Rom as an example - so, if you were putting a game on magnetic cassette in 1995 I am genuinely not sure whether it would apply! I suspect you could point to invade-a-load as prior art, though... academic now, though.)