The fact emulators are faster than the real hardware, can you blame them?

This is a problem Nintendo has had a few times before, choosing weaker hardware makes it much easier for other platforms to match and outpace them.

My first time playing Pokemon was emulating Pokemon Red on PC. For some reason they put it in Australian stores around a month after the US release so emulation was the only way.

Similarly GBA was playable on PC very early in its cycle. DS/3DS was a bit less attractive because of it screen layout and inputs but that kind of quirk aside underpowered handheld hardware is just asking for emulator support.

The bill text is concise and surprisingly readable.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB2426#99INT

They will either need “affirmative acknowledgment from the purchaser” of their rights or provide a “clear and conspicuous statement” clarifying the buying a digital good is a licence situation.

They provide this definition:

“Clear and conspicuous” means in a manner that clearly calls attention to the language, such as in larger type than the surrounding text, or in contrasting type, font, or color to the surrounding text of the same size, or set off from the surrounding text of the same size by symbols or other marks.

For “affirmative acknowledgment” my guess is something like PlayStation does currently might become common. Every time I checkout their purchase button is disabled until I tick a checkbox with this statement:

I request immediate access to my purchase and acknowledge that I will not be able to cancel my purchase once I start downloading or streaming the content.

Both of these scenarios should be displayed as part of the checkout flow, not hidden away in the ToS/EULA.

Square Enix also bought Taito so they had titles from the Bubble Bobble, Space Invaders, Double Dragon, Chase H.Q series on Sega Consoles.

Yeah they manage both distribution methods.

I’m just highlighting at least one example where they have regrettably left the standalone as a 2nd class option.

I had a situation with The Saboteur.

When installed manually with downloaded installers it had configuration issues, IIRC it was limited to 1280x720 and the in game option to modify it didn’t work.

But when installed with Galaxy it defaulted to 1920x1080 and the in game options worked.

At that point my game was working and I didn’t investigate further so I don’t know if it was downloading different installers, or performing post install tweaks to my game config, but from a functional perspective the game was broken when not using Galaxy. Ideally whatever the “magic” was it should be included in the standalone installers!

I had a think about this scenario and I think that if Steam was going to present this argument they would need to document and support this workflow. At the moment the fact that it sometimes works is more of an accident than anything (essentially it’s all just files on a disc and sometimes the files still work if you move them somewhere else).

But if they document that you can transfer the install data to another location, and identify which titles that applies to? Then I can see a reasonable argument that they qualify.

This article seems to say that it covers only digital items that have an always online requirement.

https://www.gamefile.news/p/california-ab2426-crew-call-of-duty

So i think offline games don’t need the warning, but online games, steaming movies, etc do need the warning.

Edit:

I looked a bit further and found the bill text:

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billTextClient.xhtml?bill_id=202320240AB2426#99INT

(4) This section does not apply to any of the following:

[…]

© Any digital good that is advertised or offered to a person that the seller cannot revoke access to after the transaction, which includes making the digital good available at the time of purchase for permanent offline download to an external storage source to be used without a connection to the internet.

This exception clearly allows for user downloadable installer for a game with offline functionality. But consoles, steam, etc where you don’t get a standalone installer, they look like they will need the warning on all titles.

In Australia they’ve bumped it from au$25 (with periodic discounts to au$12.50) to au$60.

Thats a 140% increase!

No mention of the recent changes to classify simulated gambling R18+.

Thats going to cause some titles to cut content to avoid the higher rating.

It had a public github repo so I would expect there to be copies in the wild.

Average score was 76 placing it in the 63rd percentile.

https://opencritic.com/game/16790/star-wars-outlaws/charts

Its the kind of middle of the pack results that show its not bad but its not great either. License fans with realistic expectations will probably have a good time.

Yes, that kind of packaging is exactly what he is fighting!

I had assumed they were a one and done appliance that would be replaced if under warranty with the faulty unit going to e-waste.

Oh! So that treaty somewhat standardizes PA patent rights across participating nations and allows a the patent office to act as a agent in procuring international patents but doesn’t actually offers a “globally” recognized patent in the way that the Berne Convention does for copyright.

So it looks like the infamous loading screen minigame patent was only registered in Japan and the USA. If I have this right it would not have been a barrier to implementing a loading screen minigame anywhere else (e.g. PAL regions in their entirety)?

https://patents.google.com/patent/US5718632

The cycle I see is aligned with the console generations.

For the first half of the gen the console proposition is reasonably modern and some people with older PCs will pick up a console instead of a new PC build.

For the second half of the gen the console proposition is dated and PCs can achieve the same power for a modest price, or exceed that power for a few dollars more. Some people will switch to PC either as an upgrade or when their current console fails.

Then the cycle continues every 6 or 7 years.

Isn’t this the scenario the Patent Cooperation Treaty was intended to resolve?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patent_Cooperation_Treaty

LOUD!

That can be a problem for games that skew older too.

Any games with a companion with have them brainstorming solutions the second you enter a puzzle room. Its exactly what I would be doing if I was in the companion’s shoes but as a player it can be frustrating when you haven’t been given a chance to even look around.

* glares pointedly at uncharted *

Thankfully these patents both expired in 2017:

https://patents.google.com/patent/JP3350773B2/en
https://patents.google.com/patent/JP3295771B2/en

This a been in the courts for a while, does anyone know which titles were found to be infringing?

My lay understanding was that patents were invalidated if prior art could be found before the application date?

If that was true then no patent Nintendo applied for after palwold demonstrated its use of a technique would hold water. This demonstration would be easy to verify as occurring at the time of release of preview videos, the games release, content patches, etc

So I must be wrong if they think JP7545191B1 might be the one.