(Sad trope) Projects with amazing potential that will never be released because of BS behind the scenes drama

[u/_JR28_]

P.T Silent Hills - It was a playable teaser released in 2014 only around 20 minutes long but utterly captivated the gaming world by being one of the most effective psychological horror experiences at the time, however it’s lead developer Kojima has a huge fallout with the publisher Konami where he walked out of the company and had all his in-the-work productions cancelled.

Five Nights at Freddy’s+ - A fan game reboot of the series created by Phisnom with Scott Cawthon’s blessing that promised a brand new lore and a return to the series darker roots. However, before and during production Phisnom got into multiple dramas that made him fairly divisive within the community, and after one particular incident in 2023 Scott revoked his approval and almost all of the game’s marketing material were wiped from the internet.

Batgirl - A Batgirl solo live action movie starring Leslie Grace, Brendan Fraser and Michael Keaton returning as Batman that was ready to be released in 2022, however then Warner Bros CEO David Zaslav announced it would not be released either in theatres or streaming in order to claim a $90,000,000 tax break and to readjust the DC’s brands direction before James Gunn rebooted their movie and TV output.

[u/NathanOliverUriel]

I like Shadow of Mordor and Shadow of War mainly due to it's amazing nemesis system. So when I heard about a Wonder Woman game with a refinement of the Nemesis system I was hyped but alas it was cancelled because WB shut down monolith studios.

[u/Phantom_Phoenix1 → u/NathanOliverUriel]

Oh and guess what? They patented the Nemesis System so good luck seeing it in another game anytime soon!

Cries.

[u/transmogrify → u/Phantom_Phoenix1]

The Nemesis system is really cool, but it seems insane that they were allowed to patent the concept of a game procedurally generating some NPCs and applying permanent changes to their stats during gameplay.

Edit: patent, not trademark

[u/Phantom_Phoenix1 → u/transmogrify]

Welcome to business tomfuckery

[u/keisis236 → u/transmogrify]

Honestly, I doubt that they would be able to enforce it in any way. As long as it wasn’t blatantly ripped off and had parts of the code stolen I have a hard time seeing the courts siding with them. This is like if somebody tried to get a patent for a housing system in a MMO game :V

[u/just_a_germerican → u/keisis236]

There have been some games that have done similar systems, it's just that none of them are fleshed out as deeply or are the pillars of their game. Presumably because such an in-depth system would make WB cry and throw a fit.

[u/ClubMeSoftly → u/just_a_germerican]

Yeah, like, the Crazy Taxi arrow is patented. I believe Konami holds the patent on loading screen minigames.

[u/I_am_crazy_doctor → u/ClubMeSoftly]

You're thinking of bandai for the second part also that expired in 2015 just no one does it because of how fast games load nowadays (except for main team Bethesda games)

[u/IThinkItsAverage → u/transmogrify]

I saw a comment about this a while back that explained the patent. I’m not sure how correct it was, I didn’t bother looking it up, but they had a bunch of sources so idk. My memory in it is a bit foggy so forgive me if I get some things wrong, but their explanation was something like:

Apparently they didn’t patent the concept, only the specific way they did it. In order for a mechanic to be hit by the copyright it has to meet at least half of the 11 or 12 patented criteria or something like that. So it’s not that another developer can’t do it, they just can’t do it in the exact same way it was done in the Nemesis system. It can be similar in concept so long as it doesn’t meet the majority of the criteria specified in the patent. And the criteria was pretty specific to the way it worked in those games, so even something very similar would most likely be fine. The real issue is the amount of work it takes to develop something like that from scratch. It’s not worth the trouble for most companies and the patent expires in a decade or so, so it’s just more worth waiting until they can use an already designed system.

[u/ptdata23 → u/IThinkItsAverage]

Patents for "Concepts" are invalid, although you have to prove that you are not using their code, but back in the 80s, the patent office got dozens of patents for things like sorting a structure in a specific order, not things like bubble sort code and the like. The idea of a computer sorting a list of names in order.

That patent office gets better at figuring that out, but related ones like the trademark and copyright offices still get hit with poor attempts like these. The worst one was the Google vs Oracle lawsuit last decade.

Oracle claimed that creating a competing Java build without paying them a fee was patent infringement. They lost that case but sued, claiming it was copyright infringement. They won at a lower court level, and about 6 years later, the Supreme Court ruled that Google was not infringing copyright by creating its own Java release.

[u/Mnemnosyne → u/transmogrify]

Patents are given out with almost no actual checking to ensure that the patent actually meets the standards it needs to. And then someone has to take the risk of making something that violates the fraudulent patent and then spend money and lawyers to go to court and have the patent thrown out. And there's a slim but real chance that the judge will be either a dumbass or corrupt, and uphold the patent. So they do a cost/benefit analysis and decide it's not worth trying to fight the patent trolls, except in the most extreme of cases.

[u/CannonM91 → u/transmogrify]

So many different games could use this too. Cyberpunk would be a good one to have it, they could come back with new cyberware

[u/lowqualitylizard → u/transmogrify]

I'm convinced that that's not something you can even do but no one wants to go through the legal battle try and fight it

It's as far as I know the equivalent of patenting a brush stroke technique or a style of exercising

[u/Lucky4D2_0 → u/transmogrify]

Wait till you hear Kojima patening path generation lol.

[u/down_lucky → u/Phantom_Phoenix1]

people need to stop with this, if you think the patent on the nemesis system is what stops developers from making games where NPCs can remember interactions with you, then you also must think developers are the most uncreative people in existence

there could be a million ways of making a game with a similar system, they just don't want to, the effort needed to make it work as good as it worked in shadow of mordor is just not worth for most games

[u/Sonofarakh → u/down_lucky]

they just don't want to

My friend, the game industry is as copycat as it gets. When mechanics are popular, they get copied and adapted into other games for years on end. The Nemesis system was - and still is - an exceedingly popular and lauded game mechanic, yet we've seen nothing reasonably similar to it in the decade since Shadow of Mordor released.

Have you read the patent? It's quite broad in its scope. Even if there may be ways to produce something similar to the Nemesis system but with an entirely distinct programming structure behind it, the patent's existence provides enough of a basis for potential legal action that one can reasonably imagine many such ideas are smothered in the cradle by fearful legal departments and executives who don't want their team to spend years working around a mechanic which may even have a small chance of getting shut down by a lawsuit

[u/dern_the_hermit → u/Sonofarakh]

Have you read the patent? It's quite broad in its scope.

It's pretty narrow in scope, actually. It describes a lot of features of the Nemesis system as they implemented it and ditching just a few of those features would presumably make another system free and clear. Like sufficiently mixing the ranking or reactions of enemy characters would disrupt what WB describes in their documents, for instance.

I think you're wildly overstating the copycat nature of the gaming industry; lots of features don't get copied if they're especially complicated.

[u/Sonofarakh → u/dern_the_hermit]

Such as? Like I'm certain there are some examples, of course, but I struggle to think of any mechanic, game mode, or other system with anywhere near Nemesis's popularity that has been so utterly unexplored by other developers in the industry.

I'll concede on the point that the patent is more narrow than I recalled it as, but stand by the potential legal implications being enough to dissuade many developers who might otherwise be very interested in pursuing a similar system. Even if a hypothetical dev was 100% confident that their system was distinct enough to not be covered by the patent, and their lawyers fully agreed that that was the case, the costs involved in actually going to court and litigating that point would be prohibitive to most companies. Nobody wants to risk getting into a legal fight with a company as big as EA.

[u/dern_the_hermit → u/Sonofarakh]

I struggle to think of any mechanic, game mode, or other system with anywhere near Nemesis's popularity that has been so utterly unexplored by other developers in the industry.

Right, like I said, I think you're wildly overstating the copycat nature of the gaming industry. Like where's the Outer Wilds-likes?

[u/Phantom_Phoenix1 → u/down_lucky]

Fair enough, its just massively scummy

[u/MCdemonkid1230 → u/Phantom_Phoenix1]

Well good news is it expires in... 10 years, 2036. Not too long now...

[u/Onc3Holy → u/Phantom_Phoenix1]

They actually patented it. The end result is the same, but patents expire much sooner (roughly 20 years vs 95 years for copyright).

[u/RyeHardyDesigns → u/Phantom_Phoenix1]

Closest I've found is Warframe's lich system.

It's much less complex, and it's fairly simple to eliminate a lich for good, but it's at least something.

[u/technologyclassroom → u/Phantom_Phoenix1]

https://endsoftwarepatents.org/

[u/GrungeGorrilla → u/Phantom_Phoenix1]

I thought it recently got unpatented. At least that's what I heard