#but to me the potential downfalls of this practice far outweight the hypothetical and very circumstancial benefits

[rawliverandgoronspice]

Ok, so since you're in gamedev, I'm curious about your perspective on patenting gameplay mechanics, like how the Ascend mechanic was patented prior to ToTK's release. I know Nintendo aren't the only ones doing this, but how common of a practice is that in general? And do you think there's any merit to it or no?

Heyyy sorry I was having a very busy week/weekend, so I kind of left this ask to the side given this is a pretty complicated subject, but here we go!!

So... Basically, my opinion is that it's mostly a bullying method for big corporations, and what seems like a tentative to protect one's work for smaller individuals/entities that they can't realistically enforce anyway. To me, and many devs, it's considered poor etiquette at the very least, especially given the highly iterative nature of gamedev and the extremely specific application of any given idea. The fact that the boundaries of tolerance and how aggressive a company will be at protecting what they feel they own (and here something as nebulous as an intellectual concept and context-less execution) will generally be blurry at best, especially since it's super hard to parse what could be considered inspiration VS what is derivative in a game mechanic, it tends to merely discourage innovation from smaller studios in that specific field, while still having bigger companies perhaps risking a lawsuit because they have already assessed they could cushion the consequences if it does come to that.

As often with copyright laws, but perhaps even moreso here, it dabbles in the corporate justice system, and it is a system that will always disproportionately protect the wealthy, the influencial and the powerful, while leaving people without resources extremely vulnerable. Imagine being a small studio trying to patent your cool mechanic, and then a giant like Riot Games waltz along and decides to steal your mechanic anyway. Can you afford the money to stay lawyered-up for years? Can you tolerate the stress of this David and Goliath situation, or existing in the public eye, or the potential smear campaigns, etc? And if you don't want to enforce your rights due to a lack of resources, your rights may as well not exist.

So I am personnally pretty much against the practice on this basis alone, even discounting how that approach runs counter to the very community-based spirit of game design and game studies. The goal of any self-respecting game designer should be to craft the best possible experience for players. It's good to protect yourself, your living, your place in history of course, but freezing the course of that history for little more than greed... It's not really well considered by a lot of devs that I know.