I would delight and drink heavily in celebration if it were announced every idiot who reads every patent filing looking for the latest thing to panic about and write endless Chicken Little prophecy articles like these ate cyanide and gagged to death.
People file (and are granted) retarded patents every day of the week. Almost none of it is ever actually used or even developed beyond whatever is required for the patent application to be written, reviewed (lol like the PTO ever does that anymore) and granted. I knew a guy (fucker bounced me a check once, too) who held a patent for user activity tracking on a website (you know, that thing literally every website does now?) who couldn't find anyone dumb enough to actually implement his system because his intention was obviously to build a minimum viable product to use to litigate against the big boys like Web Urchin, Google AdSense and DoubleClick and attaching your name to that kind of shit is a career killer for obvious reasons.
Patents are not reviewed by the PTO more than superficially (and I remain convinced the current status quo is proof the entire patent and trademark system needs to be gutted, deleted, and all related litigation reversed/stopped) and pretty much all modern patent filing is done "defensively."
This "controller as payment device" patent is a great example. I'm unwilling at the moment to go digging further, but I feel like I've heard of this kind of patent before and wouldn't be surprised at all if Nintendo, Microsoft or even the old dog Sega has a patent like this as well. All controllers are payment devices btw, since they control devices with functioning storefronts. Nintendo controllers additionally already support NFC (for Amiibos), which is what's used for "tap-to-pay" implementations. This patent could be invalidated pretty quickly with a well-crafted filing (it's "obvious" for one thing, it isn't novel or useful for another, it addresses a non-existent problem, and existing products do what it claims to do better already), but it's not worth the time or expense since nobody's profiting off it at the moment and isn't likely to try.
Another, more illustrative example would be the recent griping about a Microsoft patent application (naturally referring to Xbox in the filing) for what amounts to in-game ads (they add the "clever twist" of rewarding users with useless tokens to spend on useless digital goods to try to distinguish this from all the other patents owned by Nintendo, Sony and even (IIRC) Namco and Sega for the same fucking thing) that interrupt gameplay to shovel ads down your throat. "Gaming Jesus" did a panicked Chicken Little doomer video about it recently. I wanted to slap the smug little weasel for sensationalizing it like that.
That obnoxious idea has been "patented" for almost 40 years at this point. The first wily asshole who came up with it (or at least who had the balls to file) was some marketing wanker tangentially related to the video game industry back when it was still Nintendo and Sega plus the fledgling PC "wild west" market. Nobody's actually pulled the trigger on it though. Before anyone "well ackshually"'s that assertion, I'm referring specifically to a $60+ AAA title, bought by a player, that willfully interrupts gameplay in an intrusive fashion to show a non-skippable advertisement that's not part of the game. Parody ads that fit a game's storyline obviously don't count, nor do gachas or free-to-play games since predatory monetization is front-and-center in the design and the "reward" for watching the ads is "you can play the game now."
These are all "defensive" patents. They're never filed with the intention of ever actually implementing the described design. They're filed so that if the holder ever does anything even tangentially related to it and some patent troll sues them over it, they can claim "fuck you, we're implementing our own patents, eat our shit, also countersuit because you're suing us for using our idea, you idea thief!" Conversely they're also used
against competitors when they implement it in a way they (the holder) perceives to be damaging to the market or industry in general. That's not to say a patent holder ever gives a shit about the public good, but if they hold a patent and see a competitor do something stupid they can use patent trolling to stop, they will.
The only gaming-related patent I can think of over the past 30 years that actively made products a little bit worse because the holder refused to license anyone else to use the idea and made it clear they'd litigate to stop anyone from doing it was Namco's now-expired patent on interactive mini-games on loading screens. Video games have had loading screens for decades since at first optical media was slow, then games got too complex for instant-startup and even with SSDs the fucking things still spend too much time loading up. People long wondered "why can't I play some stupid little mini-game while this OG PSX is loading this game at a whopping 600kb/sec off that rip-roaring double-speed CD-ROM drive?" and the answer has always been "because Namco patented it and threatened to sue anyone who does it, because they're cunts I guess."
It was a minor nuisance in the grand scheme of things, but in case you ever wondered why "nobody ever thought of that," well, the truth is everybody did and nobody could implement it because Namco held a patent for it. Miserable fucks. In fact it was a bit of a "coup" when
Castlevania: Symphony of the Night on PSX let you mess with the "Now Loading" graphic by fiddling with the L1/L2 sticks on the PSX Dualshock controller. There was speculation Namco would actually sue over that, but they never did. They probably figured it wasn't
quite a "mini-game" since all you could do was make the letters wiggle and distort with your inputs and it had no in-game effects.
