Are Video Game Patents Ruining the Industry? | Design Delve
Added 2025-08-18 15:03:41 +0000 UTCThis week's episode of Design Delve is now available!
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But they incentivize not only by granting exclusive use. They make this use a tradable good, even if the patent-holder doesn't want to keep using it themselves. So, any idea why licensing doesn't seem to be a big thing here? I have a hard time imagining that no competitor would pay for the right to use the Nemesis system... Or is it and we just usually talk about the other parents?
JR
2025-08-23 20:41:27 +0000 UTCI'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...
JR
2025-08-23 20:36:46 +0000 UTCThank 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.
Dan McAlister
2025-08-22 22:57:48 +0000 UTCThere’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).
Tim Wilson
2025-08-19 16:21:21 +0000 UTCVery interesting video, thanks jm8!
bluemage27034
2025-08-18 21:43:15 +0000 UTC
