I am positive prior art could be claimed for most if not all of those. Square Enix could cry afoul of the āmounting creaturesā one as well as Iām sure many, many other earlier games on a plethora of platforms.
You could mount and ride Chocobos in Final Fantasy 2, i.e. the real ā2,ā the JDM only one on Famicom, which was released in 1988. The aforementioned patent was only filed on Nintendoās part in 2024.
They can, to use a technical legal term, get fucked.
Yes but itās fucking expensive to invalidate a patent. Possibly in the millions of dollars. Thatās how patent trolls succeed - itās far cheaper to own a bad patent than to fight one.
Blizzard should be paying attention to this, as it perfectly describes their flying mounts.
I really hope Nintendo just picked a fight with Blizzard/Microsoft lol
Bullies tend to pick victims who canāt fight back too effectively, so I doubt theyād go after Microsoft.
All the big tech companies have a bunch of vague patents than in a just world would never exist, and they seldom go after each other, because they know then theyāll be hit with a counter-suit alleging they violate multiple patents too, and in the end everyone except the lawyers will be worse off. Itās sort of like mutually assured destruction. They donāt generally preemptively invalidate each otherās patents, so if Microsoft is not a party to the suit, theyāll likely stay out of it entirely.
However, newer and smaller companies are less likely to be able to counter-sue as effectively, so if they pose a threat of taking revenue from the big companies (e.g. by launching on competitor platforms only), they are ripe targets for patent-based harassment.
While Microsoft is not a target right now, if that patent for ground-flying mounts is used (which I doubt it will, given itās too recent and widely used by older games), Palworld can just point at World of Warcraft Burning Crusade as prior art and it suddenly becomes MS vs Nintendo.
