by Peter Vandevort | Oct 29, 2022 | Commentary |
The Medium by Bloober Team is a 2020 game known for its unique “Dual-Reality” mechanic, making full use of modern processing powers to generate two worlds at the same time. Bloober Team is now trying to extract the most use from this mechanic with its patent, preventing Dual-Reality from being used in a variety of video game genres in the future. Despite the multitude of protections that video games are guaranteed through copyright and trademark law, some video game developers receive patents on mechanics within the game itself. What these developers fail to realize is that this provides them with no benefit and may potentially hurt them instead. This blog post focusses on how patenting major video game mechanics of AAA games (“big-budget” games), is not in a company’s best interest. To understand why these patents hurt video game companies, we can compare the video game industry to the pharmaceutical industry, which is sometimes called the “poster child” of the patent world. Patents are considered one of the most important parts of the pharmaceutical industry because research and clinical testing for drugs is extremely costly, but once the drugs are approved by the FDA, they are relatively easy to produce generic copies of. Additionally, patented drugs have a specific use that fills an active niche on the market, one which no other currently available drug can satisfy. Without the patent system or some other means to ensure exclusivity, pharmaceutical companies would have significantly reduced profits generated by the market. These companies therefore spend significant amounts of money keeping competitors out of the sphere for years or even just months...
