Pal-dora's Box yawns open as Sega sues MementoMori developers over mechanic patents, seeking 1 billion yen in damages
It's too early to say exactly which way the wind is blowing, but it sure feels like Nintendo's opened a Pandora's Box of patent lawsuits in Japan—for the uninitiated, Nintendo took a public swing at Palworld after a few months of relative silence, filing a lawsuit in September. Now Sega's following suit, attempting to claim similar damages from MementoMori, a 2022 gacha game that's primarily mobile-focused, though it does have a client for PC as well.
As reported by Otaku Souken, the lawsuit alleges that a set of five patents have been infringed—which are, as you might guess, primarily related to fairly innocuous gacha mechanics. I'm unable to get into the core specifics myself—patent language is obnoxiously specific and roundabout at the best of times, but there's also a language barrier going on here in terms of translation.
However, Japanese game industry consultant Serkan Toto took to X to analyse the changes yesterday, and noted that one of them—5930111, which «solves the conflicting psychological problems» when using rare items—essentially translates to «a specific system for fusing character cards of the same kind more easily». Another, 6402953 appears to describe a specific gacha system for character pulls.
As Otaku Souken points out, MementoMori was a big success for developer and publisher Bank of Innovation, making up 90% of the company's recent sales. The report states that both companies were in talks with each other about the dispute, but were «unable to reach an agreement». Unsurprisingly, Bank of Innovation disputes Sega's claims, and states it'll keep running the game if possible. Toto also goes on to report that the studio's stock price dropped a sharp 17% as a result of the news.
As broken down by IP attorney Kirk Sigmon, who PC Gamer spoke to in the fallout of Nintendo's lawsuit, filings like this have to be hyper-specific, and prove that every single word within the patent has been in some way infringed upon by the developer in question—which is
Read more on pcgamer.com
