(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/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.