EA (Electronic Arts) have added a few more patents to their Patent Pledge for Increasing Accessibility to help game developers. The idea is that game developers are free to use ideas they've patented, without fear of EA coming after them.
As EA say: "Through the Pledge, we share our accessibility-centered technology with the wider industry so that together we can meet the needs of our diverse gaming community. It covers some of our most innovative technologies designed to break down barriers for players with disabilities. This includes those with vision, hearing, speaking or cognitive conditions. Better yet, all this IP has been shared royalty-free, which means you won’t need to pay royalties or license fees to use it."
I covered some of what they did with this previously when they also open sourced Fonttik, but now they've added some more patents for devs to use including these:
Auto-detects when a player stops interacting with a game and temporarily converts their player-controlled character to a personalized system-driven character.
Patent No.: US 10,864,446
Country: United States
Title: AUTOMATED PLAYER CONTROL TAKEOVER IN A VIDEO GAME
Date Issued: December 15, 2020
Date added to pledge: December 1, 2023Provides guidance on performing in-game commands in a way that’s tailored to each player’s skill or play style.
Patent No.: US 10,279,264
Country: United States
Title: ADAPTIVE GAMING TUTORIAL SYSTEM
Date Issued: May 7, 2019
Date added to pledge: December 1, 2023Generates navigation routes and displays navigation aid lines directing players through large and complex game worlds.
Patent No.: US 10,406,437
Country: United States
Title: ROUTE NAVIGATION SYSTEM WITHIN A GAME APPLICATION ENVIRONMENT
Date Issued: September 10, 2019
Date added to pledge: December 1, 2023Provides players a personalized, animated coach for improving their in-game performance.
Patent No.: US 11,724,201
Country: United States
Title: ANIMATED AND PERSONALIZED COACH FOR VIDEO GAMES
Date Issued: August 15, 2023
Date added to pledge: December 1, 2023
They also put up IRIS as open source under the BSD license on GitHub, which they say is a "solution created by EA to identify video footage that could potentially cause photosensitive epileptic risks", so it will help developers identify areas they may needs to improve / adjust as it will analyse "video content and checks for flashes and spatial patterns that could be harmful for people with photosensitive epilepsy, or cause discomfort in viewers".
Article taken from GamingOnLinux.com.
Quoting: PikoloOh, it's very clever. It means you can only challenge a patent if you're a deep-pocketed corporation who can afford the lawsuit . . . but those guys swap licenses for their fake patents, so it's less of a deal for them. So the little guys get shafted. That's not luck, that's lobbyist skill.Quoting: F.UltraThat actually explains a lot. Though its very dumbQuoting: PikoloThe patent office can't find prior art for those? How? They're all issued since 2019! The only one that even seems novel is AUTOMATED PLAYER CONTROL TAKEOVER IN A VIDEO GAME, and I'd assume someone more familiar with MMORPGs can find an example. ROUTE NAVIGATION SYSTEM WITHIN A GAME APPLICATION ENVIRONMENT is bonkers - we've had animated navigation lines for decades!
USPTO no longer looks for prior art since at least a decade back, the new regime is that they only do very basic checks and then any violations such as prior art is up for a court to decide in a future lawsuit.
pleasereadthemanual Dec 13, 2023
Quoting: F.UltraThis explains a lot about how Unified Patents manages to keep invalidating codec patents in court...Quoting: PikoloThe patent office can't find prior art for those? How? They're all issued since 2019! The only one that even seems novel is AUTOMATED PLAYER CONTROL TAKEOVER IN A VIDEO GAME, and I'd assume someone more familiar with MMORPGs can find an example. ROUTE NAVIGATION SYSTEM WITHIN A GAME APPLICATION ENVIRONMENT is bonkers - we've had animated navigation lines for decades!
USPTO no longer looks for prior art since at least a decade back, the new regime is that they only do very basic checks and then any violations such as prior art is up for a court to decide in a future lawsuit.
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