Sony's lawsuit against Tencent

[Rand]

Sony should focus on making games people want to actually buy and play instead

No, they're doing the opposite, based on their "support" of Days Gone and abandonment of a known existing audience desiring a sequel they basically ruled out after the devs proposed it to them.

[KOS-MOS]

Sony should focus on making games people want to actually buy and play instead

No, they're doing the opposite, based on their "support" of Days Gone and an known existing audience for a sequel they basically ruled out after the devs proposed it to them.

Yeah I heard that. Shame on them, I enjoyed Days Gone a lot.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Main problem is that Sony has no leverage to prevent this from launching in China, which has become the biggest videogame market in the world and alone will make the game turn a profit. China has a long history of allowing foreign imports in for a time before kicking out the stool under the foreigner's feet and then taking everything and running it themselves there. Lawsuits by foreigners never succeed in accomplishing anything, nor do Western governments do anything about this. There is no symmetry of risk for China so ofcourse they will not stop.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

If Sony could get the Western governments to threat to revoke Tencent's ability to export all of their stuff to the West iver this, or even threaten to ban their involvement in the Western economy, then perhaps you would see the Chinese rethink this. Wouldn't be worth cutting off all these foreigm vectors over just one game. The Western governments however are ignorant or willfully blind to the Chinese's soft power hostile takeovers as they stick their fingers in every company and buy uplots of Asutralian and American neighborhoods and mass immigrate rheir people over to colonize and take over college student councils and shut people down for criticizing China... so it won't happen.

[rusty_shackleford]

which has become the biggest videogame market in the world

I don't think it's a predatory mobileshit game so it will barely sell any copies there

[AmericanMonarchist]

Don't think we have a thread for this.
Original article: https://archive.is/Cb9fO
Tencent response: https://archive.is/5424P#selection-577. ... nre tropes.

My ten cents is: It's probably infringing just because it's so darn similar.
This is from official material:


As someone who is even aware that the game exists, I could easily confuse this for Horizon: Zero Dawn.
At some point you cross over from inspiration to copying.

Chinese company stealing ideas? I do not believe it.

[rusty_shackleford]

I don't think it's a predatory mobileshit game so it will barely sell any copies there

china is just a long history of seemingly good ideas that turn out to be really bad for reasons bugmen couldn't foresee

"ahh yes we will kill all the pests"
"oh no the pests were killing even worse pests and now all the crops are gone!!!"

"ahh yes we will ban consoles to prevent kids from gaming"
"oh no we got all our kids addicted to mobile gachashit!!!"

[aimlesshealer]

This keeps coming up and I think about it all the time, so I’m going to yell my opinion here, in this thread.

Just nuke all IP laws. And copyrights, patents, and everything else which was meant to apply to technology and business and never to stories and culture. This issue is so much bigger than legal annoyances. Stories, characters, and abstract concepts such as "summoning another character to fight on the player’s behalf" don't belong to anyone. The notion that they are property is jewry in the highest order. If these laws were wiped out, you'd see a rennaisance across every medium.

► ART RAGE

Supposedly these laws exist to protect small creators. But they don’t do anything if you don’t pony up the legal fees first. Big companies steal ideas from the little guy all the time, but is Joe the basement autist going to sue Disney? Please. Even if he won, the ordeal would drain years of his limited time and energy (not to mention sanity, which creative types have in short supply). But God help you if you want to make a (free) Metroid fan game. The only thing these laws do is give corporations a stranglehold on culture.

"But they encourage creativity, right?" This is a misconception of how creativity works. It's ahistorical and inhuman to force every generation of artists to create new stories and characters entirely from scratch. All artists cut their teeth by retelling and remixing stories they heard growing up. It would be absurd if musicians weren't allowed to practice on pre-existing pieces, yet that's what we expect from painters, writers, and game developers. Why shouldn’t they be allowed to benefit from such work? Opening up this middle ground would encourage more experimentation and creativity, not less, and would make it easier for creators to gain their footing.

"Original IP" is an illusion anyway. All culture is derivative. You only think a given IP is original because you aren’t personally aware of what it’s ripping off. All artists either admit this or they’re liars. Sometimes you need a new story, and sometimes you need to retell an old one. This is natural. Both have their place and their value. Culture is collaborative; it’s a conversation.

"But we’d be flooded in derivative, uncreative fan-slop!" You have a negative view of "fan-" works because, thanks to IP laws, the only people who make them either don’t have the skills and never will, so they suck, or they haven't invested years of time and money honing those skills, so they suck. It's a ghetto: professionals are forced to go where the money is. But it doesn’t have to be a ghetto. Did you see the trove of beautiful paintings based on Lord of the Rings posted in the art thread? Technically, that’s fanart. Would the world be a better place if those artists didn’t paint those pieces for fear that the Tolkien estate would sue them? These are the fruits of creative exchange: those artists were painters, not so much storytellers. They borrowed the narratives, emotions, and subjects from Tolkien’s imagination, and their work was all the better for it.

It’s no accident that Disney’s feature-length films are based almost exclusively on old fairy tales. Because they "ripped off" of pre-existing stories, with their richness of symbolism and meaning, they were able to focus on developing and mastering the new art of animation. Obviously the likes of Sleeping Beauty or The Little Mermaid are far from creatively bankrupt just because they weren’t "original IP." To reach such heights, you need to stand on the shoulders of giants, or at least 10 other dudes stacked on top of each other. These masterpieces are a great example of what we would get if "fan-works" were released from the ghetto of unprofessionalism.

If IP laws didn't exist, Star Wars wouldn't be a laughingstock. It would be a living part of our cultural tapestry. Competent creators would jump at the chance to get together and make Star Wars things with love and care, if only the law wouldn’t shut them down.
If IP laws didn’t exist, we’d have modern Pokemon games, the glorious kind everyone can imagine yet which aren’t allowed to exist because any project with a budget would be firebombed.
If IP laws didn’t exist, we would have Half-Life 3, and all those other beloved game series wouldn’t be abandoned to languish in the gutter. Why should they be forgotten as relics of the past? They are our cultural heritage! Someone else could breathe new life into them, not as a cash grab, but out of love. Love is what’s missing from games these days. Remasters and remakes are made with hatred and apathy, but good games are made with love.

"But wouldn’t the market be flooded with cheap ripoffs? If I write a novel about Bob the Spaceman, someone’s just going to publish it as Blob the Spaceman and steal all my profits!" Sure, some indiscriminate morons would probably buy cheap knockoffs. But a significant number of people gravitate to authors and creators and want to support them. Just look at the fervor about AI images: the mob practically hunts you down with pitchforks if they realize you didn’t personally create the work you’re passing off as your own. If the original creator or team behind the IP is still working on it, then people will naturally value their work above all imitations. Unless it starts to suck. In which case, wouldn’t it be better if the focus shifted to another, more competent creator? If someone else tells your story better, more power to them. They can exist in parallel. Try harder next time, and may the best story win. This competition would allow the people themselves to determine which ideas succeed and are passed on within the culture.

The egotism of artists nowadays is out of control. The artist’s work is a service to his people. He tells stories for them, not for himself. The artist’s job is to balance his internal sense of style and prudence with the wider cultural landscape. A story that everyone hates is useless, no matter how much the artist screams "you just don’t get it!" But it’s not solely a popularity contest either. Creative work isn't about gaining mass appeal by cynically stimulating people into excreting the right chemicals, nor is it about smothering them with your egotistical vision. Every generation of artists has a duty to revive the archetypes and lessons that have been told for millennia and tell them to the people of today in the way they need to hear. Whether this calls for a new form or the evolution of a pre-existing form, it’s a vital process which should not be interrupted.

Imagine if memes and slang were subject to legal ownership. Our ability to collectively express ourselves and adapt to new circumstances would be hamstrung. Likewise, with culture under lock and key, our ability to orient ourselves in the world and make sense of our lives is hamstrung. Our cultural narratives can’t evolve and grow. Only when Mr. Steinberg cuts a check do they get passed on—in whatever form he wants. And that’s the most hideous thing about it: these laws aren't just impractical and absurd, they’re being used against us. Art is not inconsequential. Art is vital to human existence, which is why our enemies work so hard to control it.


Disclaimer: I include game devs as artists because games are the experiential art, which ironically most of those who whine about LE GAMES ARE LE ARTE have no clue about because they suck at video games and never understood them.
Disclaimer 2: Something being entertainment or a toy is not exclusive to its being art. Art is always mixed to varying degrees with the common and practical. It's not synonymous with the pretentious (literal) crap they put in museums.

[rusty_shackleford]

Not disagreeing, but:

and abstract concepts such as "summoning another character to fight on the player’s behalf" don't belong to anyone.

This is correct and it's not covered by any IP law in USA. The patent should never have been approved to begin with. You can't patent ideas, which include game rules and other abstract mechanics. This became 100% clear post-Alice(a specific landmark case)

So, why was Nintendo's patent approved?
Writing this before reviewing the patent. My guess is because it's attached to a specific mechanical implementation.
(looked it up, and yes, that's correct)

It will almost certainly not stand up in court because it's an attempt to use an implementation of an abstract idea to enforce a patent for an abstract idea. They got a patent for something they had no intention of actually using it for.

---

Just trust me when I state the following:
If you see a patent about video games(or tabletop games, …) you can ignore it. It's either clickbait or FUD.

[aimlesshealer]

It will almost certainly not stand up in court because it's an attempt to use an implementation of an abstract idea to enforce a patent for an abstract idea.

But it does have to go to court, right? Which costs time and money. Maybe whoever does it can force Nintendo to pay their legal fees when they win, but still. It's just so stupid

[rusty_shackleford]

It will almost certainly not stand up in court because it's an attempt to use an implementation of an abstract idea to enforce a patent for an abstract idea.

But it does have to go to court, right? Which costs time and money. Maybe whoever does it can force Nintendo to pay their legal fees when they win, but still. It's just so stupid

If they actually enforce it.
Most nintendo bootlickers actually see this as nintendo defending themselves, so if anything, this is just free publicity for nintendo.

[J1M]

Pretty sure there is case law that makes game mechanic patents unenforceable that was won by Nintendo 40 years ago.

[Roguey]

"Your honor, their game features a fat and ugly redhead who fights mechanical dinosaurs while our game features a thin and attractive redhead who fights mechanical birds, fish, and mammals. Very different games."