Destructoid Checkpoint: Patents, Optimization, and Algorithms, Oh my!

While the central conceit of this newsletter has turned into my going deep on one topic each week, the games industry is pregnant with things that annoy me right now, so we’ll be skimming across a number of stories that have all popped up in the last several days.

Joy me as I don red slippers and step into gaming Oz, accompanied by three stories that represent the need for courage, a brain, and, of course, heart.

Nintendo, the cowardly lion

Nintendo makes cute games for the whole family, but they hire lawyers exclusively for adults. In a series of wins that videogame patent lawyer Kirk Sigmon (I know!) has referred to as “an embarrassing failure of the US patent system,” they were granted US Patent No.: US 12403397 B2, which covers gameplay mechanics that involve summoning a character and letting it fight another. This is bad news for angry small guys in pubs who get their large friends to back them up.

This is undoubtedly driven by the Palworld lawsuits, as Nintendo has been launching a scattershot of patent requests in an attempt to retroactively patent systems that will allow them to potentially choke the life out of a competitor. The bad news is that it could also affect other games such as Digimon, Coromon, Cassette Beasts, Temtem, Nexomon, Ooblets, and many more.

While there is a lot to be said for patents when they are used in their intended form, which is, much like intellectual property law, a reasonable means for inventors and innovators to protect themselves in the face of big business, this is really just big business using them as a cudgel. Nintendo is telling small dev teams that they should avoid exploring these systems for fear of legal reprisal—and to avoid being inspired by their work in any way.

See something that is super cool and want to iterate on that in your own way, much like Satoshi Tajiri did when he took cool bugs, real-world myths, and Shinto beliefs and put them in a wonderfully creative blender to come up with Pokémon in the first place? Well, you'd better make sure that nobody has a weird, aggressive patent that has been awarded in a way that is somewhat counterintuitive to the established workings of the patent system.

I long for the day when Nintendo gets out of its own way and finds the courage to start changing some of that weird internal culture that insists on making them, ultimately, a tough company to like, even if they make fun products.

Randy “Scarecrow” Pitchford

Optimization is becoming a big issue in gaming right now, and it's killing the long-term viability of games. Sales for Monster Hunter Wilds absolutely fell off a cliff after a few weeks because optimization was garbage. Nobody wants to buy a game and watch it herk and jerk around on the screen. What tends to be worse is the lack of honesty in the discussion. You can, I assume, already tell where this is going.

Borderlands 4 should be taking a triumphant lap after a strong release, but instead, most headlines are focusing on how terrible it runs on PC. This is a shame, as the game is really rather enjoyable, if not for all the problems, of course.

According to Gearbox hanger-on Randy Pitchford, people should have had realistic expectations, or so he said prior to release. In reality, there are videos of people with top-of-the-line rigs struggling to hold 70 FPS at what would need to be considered modest settings, given the monetary costs of the rigs they are running on. 

This attempt to act like everyone is trying to run the game on a toaster is annoying, and I am eager to find Mr. Pitchford a brain so that he might learn to avoid these easy PR snafus that make him look a bit silly. Borderlands 4 is shaping up to be a fine game. It just runs like ass, even on good systems. 

Tim Sweeney, CEO of Epic, recently waded into the Unreal 5 debate, claiming that the engine (which was used to make Borderlands 4) is very capable of running games well on lower-spec hardware. He simply believes that teams often leave the optimization part of the process too late.

I do not make games, so I am not qualified to say when teams can begin the optimization process in the current climate, but I do know that I wish many games were coming to market in a way that offered people better performance.

Google, you heartless *****

Not content with making devastating changes to its search engine and destroying many good websites and teams that had done great work over the last number of years, Google has turned its baleful eye toward YouTube. An August 13 update introduced some AI into the proceedings, and the results are already starting to emerge.

Many large YouTubers are reporting that viewership is plummeting, with the likes of Skill Up, Linus Tech Tips, Bellular News, Second Wind, Dead Meat, and many more all noticing significant declines in the number of people clicking on their videos. 

Now, the nature of the industry—especially as we all find ourselves in a position of relying too much on a single company for how the internet really works—is change. We exist at the whims of the algorithm, but for many years, they made a degree of sense. Search would attempt to answer your question with the information available on the internet, and that focus meant that websites of various types could lean into a niche and do good work.

Sadly, the new focus on AI decision-making that has brought down Google Search now seems to be impacting YouTube, which had become something of a safe haven for individuals and teams who discovered that the whole website business can be tough going. 

The really bad news is that Google honestly didn’t seem to care how many sites it put out of business when it started making these aggressive changes on the Search side, so I can only assume the same will apply here. YouTube channels that you like and enjoy are most likely about to get absolutely crushed.

Why? Because whatever money they make is a drop in the ocean compared to the long-term plans of Google and similar tech companies. The growing pains will be worth it to reach whatever golden horizon they have imagined, where all content and creativity flows from AI, delivered to willing brains via the algorithm, with 0% of the revenue being sliced off for those pesky, annoying people who come up with it. 

It’s been said a lot recently, but it bears repeating: it’s time to go back to taking control of the things you see, read, watch, and listen to on the internet. Bookmark your favorites, curate your subs tab, break out RSS feeds again. Don’t trust an algorithm to automatically show you things from people you like, and instead learn to manually check in with their channels, websites, and portfolios to see if they have produced new things for your eyes, ears, and brain.

It’s looking like Google is about to hit a lot of creators hard over the coming years, and in the attention economy, the power to save them is firmly in your hands.

What’s happening, Destructoid?

Andrej Barovic is feeling the optimization issue and is wondering how long AAA games can continue to have sub-par performance baked into their launches. - “Whether it’s developer incompetence or men in suits making the wrong calls and not allowing designers to finish their work on time and properly, matters little. The latter seems to be the more likely, as we see examples above of small studios and AA-sized projects making tremendous strides even when using the bogeyman engine, so if small teams can do it, so can the big ones.”

Tiago Manuel has been having fun with Hollow Knight: Silksong, but has something he would love to see addressed. - “Neither the bosses in the original Hollow Knight nor the ones in Hollow Knight Silksong feature health bars. This is fine for expert players doing reruns and speedruns because they always have a good sense of how much a boss can take, but it sucks for the mere mortals who aren’t great yet, especially during their initial playthroughs.”

Nathan Ellingsworth has a lot of changes they would love to see in Pokémon GO, but worries the developers are missing the mark with the ones they are making - “Over the last few weeks and months, a slew of changes have either been implemented or outlined in Pokémon Go, such as additions like the Lucky Trinket, the Gold Bottle Cap, and the incoming increase of the level cap from 50 to 80. Pokémon Go is clearly in flux as it changes ownership, and its players have mixed opinions.”

And that’s it for this week, folks. Remember, there’s no place like home.