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.
