there can be a very good case made for putting private innovation into the public realm after a period of legal protections, (typically 20 years for most places)
but anything that is public by it's very nature should never be subject to patents
This shit is somewhat agreeable now, because Pal World is so similar, but once this door is opened, it's never going to let developers have the freedom to invent and innovate, because crusty old bullies want to use the legal system to punish anyone that dares resemble 2-3 decade old game mechanics.
Should platformer games pay royalties to Nintendo for having the first character to jump twice it's height?
Video game companies rent seeking for "game mechanics patents" on old shit is just ironically anti fun.
Sega alleges infringements of the following five patents: No. 5930111, No. 6402953, No. 6891987, No. 7297361 and No. 7411307, all of which are registered in Japan.
I tried checking out that first patent there, 5930111 and who boy... is this shit hard to read
An information processing device includes: a control means for causing the player to acquire a content in response to a game execution instruction from the player; an extraction means for extracting content groups of the same type from contents possessed by the player, according to an instruction from the player; a selection means for automatically selecting fusion source contents and resource contents from each of the extracted content groups; and a fusion means for collectively fusing, for each of the fusion source contents, one of the resource contents of the same type as the each of the fusion source contents. The selection means selects, as the resource contents, contents having a rarity at or below a specific level, from each of the extracted content groups.
From my very very rough and cursory glance though: wouldn't this also likely be infringed by games such as Genshin Impact for their Auto "fuse" (aka enhancement) selection mechanic or does this patent have some more nuanced/specific thing which everyone else did not implement to skirt around it?
A couple years ago Sega noticed they could make more money if they copied Nintendo's homework with regard to legal strategy, and the world is the worse for it