Hear hear!
If it was patented in 1998 then that patent expired in like 2005, right?
In the US patents last 20yrs so it would be 2018
And it expired in 2015.
It’s been 8 years since it expired lol.
And there was a lot of discussion around that time on that topic. Not sure why no one is doing them. Namco also only did it for a few games.
I guess it doesn’t make a lot of sense or is too complicated? With the latest hard drives and software loading screens are too short anyway. We’re not doing RE2 anymore.
I’m assuming it is hard because it would require a new graphical mode and that would up the complexity a good bit as they don’t want it to break anything. Another issue would be the fact that loading screens almost always max out at least one pc resource (cpu, drives, ram, etc) so you could get back to gameplay faster. It would cause lag in the minigame unless they went out of their way to avoid maxing those out.
Yeah you’re almost always going to increase loading time and for most people who don’t play the mini game it’ll just be annoying. Most people look at their phone if a loading screen is longer than a few seconds anyway or have a drink or something.
I think the main reason is that you’re trying to dump and reload game assets quickly, it’s far easier to do that without also doing something else
Oh man, that thread on reddit I read years back was wrong!
Then how was Capcom able to have them in Ōkami?
I don’t know, but there may be technicalities involved.
I’ve heard before that FIFA was able to have them, because the loading screen games were close enough to their actual gameplay (it was a simplified scene where you could pass a ball between 2-3 soccer players, if I remember correctly).
Well, and then there’s also many games where the loading screen is ‘hidden’ in a section where your character takes an elevator or squeezes through a narrow path.
Ultimately, what even is a loading screen?
With a bit of a transition, you could argue that the minigame is actually part of the gameplay and it just happens to load things in the background.So, it could also be the case that Namco never would have sued anyone, because a court clarifying the applicability could cause their patent to lose all value, as then everyone can do it in a non-applicable way.
Maybe this is also connected as to why these mini games were absent in the Wii and PS3 versions and only came back for the latest remaster.
The video game industry if it used opensource game engines.
Godot!
The virgin open-source engine game dev
vs
The chad Chris Sawyer, rawdogging Rollercoaster Tycoon’s development in Assembly Language
Ridge racer on PSP
Uhh… original ps1
Came out a few years before namco got the patent…
Good point
