Looking up those patents, the first alludes to a system where a player aims and fires an “item” toward a character in a field, and in doing so triggers combat, and then dives into extraordinary intricacies about switching between modes within this. The second is very similar, but seems more directly focused on tweaking previous patents to including being able to capture Pokémon in the wild, rather than only during battle. The third, rather wildly, seems to be trying to claim a modification to the invention of riding creatures in an open world and being able to transition between them easily.

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[–] riskable@programming.dev 2 points 20 hours ago

Imagine if any company could just copy an indie game and scale it up/polish a bit and get all the sales.

You're describing the entire mobile games industry. You think all those top apps in the app stores are 100% original? No. They copied other games.

Also, patents have nothing to do with that. Software is covered by copyright.

Furthermore, "back in the day" manufacturing was expensive and required huge factories to build stuff (in quantity). The barrier to entry was enormous! People were mostly uneducated and there was not much in the way of "shared engineering knowledge". Ten thousand people could look at a car engine and have no friggin clue how it worked. That's why patents were necessary: Disclosure

These days disclosure has become irrelevant. Any engineer can look at an invention or product and figure out both how it works and how it was made. At the very least, they can figure out a way to make it. Just look at all the Youtube channels where every day people are making complicated machines, parts, and electronics! The mysteries are gone. Disclosure is unnecessary.

Since the entire point of patents was disclosure why do we still need them?