Patents
Other (objects, etc.) concept
Any concepts that are patented somewhere in the world. Unlike other concepts these are worth having even if just one game would be in it.
These are most likely gameplay mechanics which can be quite certainly be claimed to be hampering innovation by denying such concepts to be used, though partially it encourages it by forcing people to create new concepts (but they could just use some alternative that already exists that isn't patented). Can be at the very least be seen as reducing the spread of the particular concept and thus using them as basis for something new is diminished.
This is a container group; its children are:
| Active Time Battle | A semi-real time time progression system designed by Hiroyuki Ito for combat sequences where each entity waits for their ability to act charge but time does not pause when their "turn" is possible. | 1994 / 2019 | 22 games |
| Group size power scaling | Power of a group scales with its size. (too short) | 2003 / 2018 | 2 games |
| S3 Texture Compression | A group of lossy texture compression algorithms originally by S3 Graphics included in DirectX 6.0, OpenGL 1.3, and subsequent versions. | 1998 / 2018 | 16 games |