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Turns out you have corporate greed to thank for the existence of Shadow of Mordor's Nemesis system
(www.rockpapershotgun.com)
this post was submitted on 25 Mar 2025
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In this case “corporate greed” is making a better 1P experience so people don’t trade it in so fast.
Yeah, this is a really shitty, clickbait title.
Really, they finally found that one simple trick to maximize profits: Make a good product that people want to play longer. Go figure?
And then they locked it up and hid it from ever being used for decades….
This is a whole separate discussion; game mechanics really should not be copyrightable at all, IMO.
Small nitpick: They aren't really protected by copyright. Only the exact way mechanics are described are protected, you can describe any mechanic in your own words. This system was patented, though, which is what you need for a comprehensive state-granted monopoly on game mechanics. See Magic The gathering patenting its entire game mechanics (expired now): https://patents.google.com/patent/US5662332A/en
Fair enough; game mechanics really shouldn't be patentable. Specifically / particularly video game mechanics; every video game uses concepts and ideas from other games - there's nothing completely original anymore. Imagine if every game had patented all of its mechanics - there would be no new games, it'd be impossible to make something. Imagine if ID had patented the concept of a first person shooter, for instance.
It's odd that it takes in that direction, rather than going with trend of other patents, where the patent is for the implementation, not the idea.
Another great example of this is Bandi Namco's loading screen minigame patent, which expired in 2015. The patent was incredibly broad.
Or we'd have a huge variety of different games that are more creative.
I'd argue that the indie scene is already providing that; it's really just the AAA studios that're churning out cookie cutter garbage. However, if everyone had patented game mechanics, those indie studios wouldn't be able to make those games. I'd challenge you to find a game that hasn't borrowed something from another. I certainly can't think of one.
Every game that has hit points and damage is stealing mechanics from historical war games in the 50s, which was then stolen by naval war games in the early 70s, which was then stolen by D&D in the late 70s, and has since been stolen to this very day haha
Imagine hit points being patented...
Yeah, I think the indie scene is more creative with all aspects. Art, mechanics, themes. However, they still follow previous work and develop on it. All games would be necessity be more creative if all parts were patentable.
I think there is a case to be made for parents as they protect innovation. However for software, which develops rapidly, it's more a choke on innovation and development as innovation is more iterative.
It's the same in all art. gaming just has mechanics and code that is more easy to fall within the patent system. Don't get me wrong, I don't support parents on game mechanics. However, I think for many games we are rewarding derivative dross rather than innovation and novelty. There is a middle ground.
Perhaps parents for a shorter period, maybe 10 years. With development lead time, this would actually be shorter in practice. However, the flip side would be that if you apply for a patent, your code becomes open source after the patent expires. For that game and all derivatives of the patent sold during the period. So make the option to patent something have an upside for consumers and other companies too.
Clickbaiting on this one quote has suddenly led to media implicitly defending good old Gamestop and its contemporaries scamming little kids out of their videogame money by paying them next to nothing for games, reselling them at a huge markup and giving exactly nothing back to the people who made the games.
I guess the modern gaming press does see some parallels between themselves and brick and mortar game retailers, so maybe it's not all just disingenuous ragebait? Which is technically worse, I suppose.
Why do you think Gamestop is obligated to pay publishers? I don’t expect my local used book store to kick back royalties on used copies.
Well, that'd be on account of the previous part, where they're self-dealing by selling the games at full price, re-purchasing them for pennies and then reselling them for near-full price again.
Here's how weird the past twenty years have been: I can't tell if you're too young to remember how messed up their entire business model was or you're an older guy who has had their brain rot rewired from "Gamestop clearly sucks" and into "but we like ownership of physical media instead of the glorified rentals of digital distribution".
Because let me tell you, those two things can both suck at the same time. You really don't need to take sides here.
No, I have not.
Holy crap, we've turned this particular corner now? It's not that Lemmy is surprisingly overcome with fans of meme stocks, people have legitimately forgotten how the late days of the game specialist retailer as garbage-tier pawn shop for kids worked?
I was not ready.
It is absolutely not. As I'm telling the other person with selective amnesia, Gamestop (and a couple of identical retailers worldwide) had dominant control over both the first sale and all resales and leveraged it to force abusive practices on game developers and publishers, competitors and their more vulnerable customers.
It wasn't a used book store, it was the equivalent of Amazon also owning 80% of the physical bookstores, telling writers which books would get shelf space, refusing to keep any stock unless someone had preordered it, then proceeding to aggressively hound readers to resell every one of their books and mark them up by several times the cut they got on a first sale, then using that additional second had profit to keep buying locations and driving smaller stores out of business.
That's not how used book stores operate.
I did not. My actual response is still up there. Saying it doesn't say what it says doesn't magically rewrite it, that's a very weird thing to attempt.
I mean, you know I wrote it, right? I didn't forget, it was ten minutes ago. Nobody else is reading these.
What are you even doing, man? That's a quote from four posts ago. Out of context, at that.
The term "gaslighting" is overused on the Internet, but misquoting myself at me while ignoring my own responses is... quite the attempt.
No, it's not. You literally presented the same comparison and got a two paragraph description of how the two models aren't the same, which you're aggressively ignoring, I have to assume for the sake of trolling.
This conversation is bonkers and it is now over.
Gamestop has always sucked, but nothing unethical about a business of buy low sell high on used goods.
There's nothing intrinsically unethical about buying and selling used goods, and all buying and selling as a business needs to turn some profit.
There is absolutely a TON unethical with how Gamestop's model went about it. From their iron grip on shelf space to their aggressive pushing of preordering to avoid having to keep any stock whatsoever to their pricing structure and targeting of kids and students in a space where reselling of this particular type of used goods was not easily handled online and as a result had next to zero upwards pressure on price.
This argument superficially makes sense in a world of used game sales as fundamentally a collector's business mediated by online logistics companies for door-to-door sales, but that wasn't Gamestop's world. Gamestop existed in a world where they controlled both the first sale and all subsequent resales after having driven a bunch of smaller businesses to residual status by leveraging all the used sales money into a competitive advantage against both them and game publishers.
It sucked. It was an entirely parasytic model designed to syphon money away from everybody involved by virtue of controlling real estate. Their demise is one of very few silver linings in the world of "you own nothing" digital distribution.