TOTK has at least half a billion in sales, they don't need to try to extract any more money through patents.
Who benefits from this? Certainly not consumers, doubtful even Nintendo.
The whole thing about culture is copying and adapting things which have been done before. Video games would suck if innovation could only happen once every twenty years.
So many other things are way behind because innovation is blocked behind paywalls.
I can't articulate exactly what it should be, but patents need to be a whole lot more narrow in allowable scope and duration.
And organizations patenting things which wouldn't actually threaten their products or market position should be shamed.
>TOTK has at least half a billion in sales, they don't need to try to extract any more money through patents.
Yeah but it killed lots of good will. Lots of people realized TotK is basically BOTW1.5 and BOTW wasnt all that great.
I theorize that TotK will have been the high point of sales for the series, and future Zelda games will not quite get so high. They had marketing + fanboys echoing, I think a lot of the fanboys were disappointed.
Why wouldn't Nintendo benefit? Patents allow them to extract rent from their competitors. Just license where applicable and get $5 per sale of your competitors' games, or delay / block your competitors' games when you specifically don't like them (especially indies, who don't have the capability to fight or effectively negotiate.)
It's fairly commonplace in Japan for a bigger company in an industry to file, hold, and defend patents with their better funded legal departments so that the industry at large can use them without fear of patent trolls or wanton infringers.
TOTK has at least half a billion in sales, they don't need to try to extract any more money through patents.
Who benefits from this? Certainly not consumers, doubtful even Nintendo.
The whole thing about culture is copying and adapting things which have been done before. Video games would suck if innovation could only happen once every twenty years.
So many other things are way behind because innovation is blocked behind paywalls.
I can't articulate exactly what it should be, but patents need to be a whole lot more narrow in allowable scope and duration.
And organizations patenting things which wouldn't actually threaten their products or market position should be shamed.