Following weeks after Nintendo issued a lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair, Sega has filed a lawsuit, also in Tokyo District Court, against mobile game developer Bank of Innovation alleging patent infringement. It's the same court and the same reasoning Nintendo brought to its lawsuit. Sega is making the claim that the Bank of Innovation game Memento Mori, and other, less-popular titles in the company's portfolio violate five different patents. Each patent violation is directly related to gacha-related game mechanics, including a specific process used to fuse character cards.
Gacha games are a major business in Japan and are frequently the best-earning games each year, significantly outpacing Triple-A console releases. Typical gacha games are, like Memento Mori, idle-based RPGs filled with different types of currencies used to buy pulls from different item pools, with naturally, the more rare and better items/characters/skins requiring premium currency. This has been referred to as predatory game design by politicians, therapists and addiction counselors, who consider it to be a type of gambling. The debate over gacha games is similar to the lootbox controversy of last generation, which eventually faded away to give rise to the Battlepass system, though you can argue which system...