this post was submitted on 18 Dec 2023
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There's also a huge risk of this being misapplied. I remember way back in PS2 days, I was struggling with a jumping puzzle in the original God of War so much so that the game jumped in with a prompt offering to turn down difficulty. But turning down the difficulty in God of War reduces combat difficulty, nothing to do with the huge friggin' hole I kept falling into from mis-timing jumps.
Honestly, every game I've played that offers scaling difficulty based on performance has been because I sucked at the platforming parts that they couldn't make easier with a setting. Maybe it's a hint that I should stop playing platformers.
It's worse with this particular case because the patent is for cross-gaming. You suck at competitive Street Fighter? The next turn-based JRPG difficulty goes down.
Trying to find ways to make something patentable that otherwise wouldn't be.
They don't actually have to implement the cross-game side of things because they got a patent that covers "same or different game", and they can now carefully patent-bully over an unpatentable feature because nobody can afford to fight Sony in a lawsuit.
Edit: And I say carefully, because I cannot imagine a lawsuit about that patent being successful if properly defended unless the app in question builds the exact same behavior, which nobody is going to do because it's stupid.
Gotta love patent law. I work at a company who got a (defensibly valid IMO) patent recently. There was so much silly red tape and complication that our final patent looked unpatentable to an outside observer like myself, but was approved by the Patent Office. Unlike the original feature that was far more straightforward and innovative, but that the Patent Reviewer didn't really like because he thought some random unrelated product was "prior art".
And if I recall, that "prior art" was something very much like "list of student names in a database with various metadata like phone number or email address, rendered on a webpage". My first reaction to their objection was "wait, that is absolutely unpatentable...right?"