Looks like it’s over the game mechanics of ‘releasing a creature into a 3d environment and having it perform a contextual task’ & ‘having a rideable mount switch to a different rideable mount depending on terrain’
I don’t think either of these would work in the US, because you can’t protect game mechanics here, but I’m not sure about Japan’s take.
They haven’t actually said what the alleged infringement is yet, so we can’t know for sure what excuse they’re going to come up with is. They haven’t even told Pocketpair!
Pocketpair has a pretty good case against Nintendo here, I think, because other games have used these things before.
I know it was never actually released, but Scalebound had a mechanic that would have allowed a player to tell their dragon to perform a task, albeit, usually destructively.
Guild Wars 2 Added a mechanic years ago that let players traverse water and land by automatically a switching between mounts.
‘Releasing’ a creature into a 3d environment has been done by every minion-mancer class in an MMO since the dawn of the genre.
They are suing over a patent though (ie, a technology). What you are talking about is a copyright suit.
Unfortunately we don’t know what patents Nintendo is suing over. And I struggle to think of a patent issue that would generate a good faith claim.
Looks like it’s over the game mechanics of ‘releasing a creature into a 3d environment and having it perform a contextual task’ & ‘having a rideable mount switch to a different rideable mount depending on terrain’
I don’t think either of these would work in the US, because you can’t protect game mechanics here, but I’m not sure about Japan’s take.
They haven’t actually said what the alleged infringement is yet, so we can’t know for sure what excuse they’re going to come up with is. They haven’t even told Pocketpair!
You are correct, I missed that it was still under speculation.
Kinda wild that you could patent a super basic mechanic that pretty much anyone could come up with
Pocketpair has a pretty good case against Nintendo here, I think, because other games have used these things before.
I know it was never actually released, but Scalebound had a mechanic that would have allowed a player to tell their dragon to perform a task, albeit, usually destructively.
Guild Wars 2 Added a mechanic years ago that let players traverse water and land by automatically a switching between mounts.
‘Releasing’ a creature into a 3d environment has been done by every minion-mancer class in an MMO since the dawn of the genre.
Okay they need to lose that first one wtf.
Yes, from I’ve read they haven’t quoted any specific patent to anyone. They don’t have good grounds, they just want it shut down.