_Silence_ said:
As far as I know, gaming was always far from patents
I think in your case, ignorance was bliss.
Minigames during loading, player location pings, directional arrows as a guide, the d-pad itself, marching cubes to find a surface, collision danger areas, wireless controllers, unlockables, and so many, many more. I believe these are all expired, but they've all blocked development of features for a while.
And they go back to the beginning, there were patents on Pong.
They've always been there, the only difference is that now you know.
_Silence_ said:
What are your thoughts ?
The general advice from lawyers tends to be to remain ignorant if you can, remain vigilant once that's lost.
Damages if you didn't know tend to be minimal, and naïve implementations tend to have critical differences from the patented versions. If you know about it, avoid it both because damages can be tripled and because knowing details makes it more likely that an implementation will infringe rather than discovering something partially original.
As long as you're out there being creative you're unlikely to trip over any patent landmines. Even so, always send them to legal folks for a review as standard procedure because sometimes you can.
If you're in a company and you let the legal team review the game and do patent research, they'll do their jobs. On The Sims the dev team didn't monitor how they knew but we'd occasionally get feedback, “legal says the red food wrapper looks too much like this brand of candy, change it and resubmit”, or “legal says the phone looks too much like an iphone, don't use four icons across.” It was uncommon, but often enough to know someone out there was involved. For small businesses there should be a legal review and insurance, on many projects at small companies about late beta when artwork is finalized it gets sent for review and then we get a bunch of comments from an external legal review, it's an important business procedure before shipping. For hobby developers usually they're too small for anyone to care about, plus most will be aware of the Streisand effect, and if neither apply usually a C&D is all it takes, no lawsuit required, plus the hobbyist has no budget for legal anyway.
These aren't the “patent trolls”, or patents made by non-practicing entities that only exist to extract money.
These are businesses whose main business is making games, not suing people. USUALLY they're only used defensively against clones. It's expensive to fight the legal battle even if it's clearly 100% infringing. Studios rarely sue over their patent protections, but if they're going to sue someone for cloning they'll look up copyrights, patents, trademarks, trade dress, unlawful business practices, restraint of trade, and anything else they think might potentially stick or encourage the infringer to get out.
