How the utility patents would be evaluated

How the utility patents would be evaluated

The user agreements together with the terms of service for the gaming companies registered for the outlined patents would be examined for the second part of the review. At the same time, this part would be examining the terms of use of the top gaming organizations in line with in-game purchasing revenue and total software. The reason for incorporating these additional organizations would be important in ensuring representation of organizations that have been characterized with very profitable or successful corporate approaches associated with in-game purchases and software. One of the leading companies in market research had established that top ten gaming organizations for the financial year of 2016-2017. Such gaming companies were composed of Tencent, Activision Bizzard, Apple, Google, Bandai Namco, Sony, Microsoft, Electronic Arts, NetEase, and Nintendo. The basis of this list would be associated with the quarterly and annual financial reports, irrespective of the revenues of the companies regarding the sales of hardware and other sales coming from non-game commodities. The first part of the review will have pointed out the first two top organizations including NetEase and Activision. Apart from the outlined top organizations, Aftershock and Kabam would be added from the list of the patent assignee. Up to 12 documents of terms of use would be summarized in line with the conditions associated with restrictions on age, entitlement of refund, disclaimer of warranty, disclosure of value, that is, the condition of currency or virtual commodities, and possession or ownership of the property of game, comprising of the video game loot boxes. The documents of terms of use would be retrieved from the official website of each of the companies.

How the utility patents would be evaluated

There would be a summarization of the selected patents according to the characteristics including details of registration/code of identification, ownership of the company/assignee, patent name/title of patent, functional description summary/feature description which would be obtained from the document patent and experience of the system by the player/player perspective. The other characteristic that would be placed into account is the sales approaches or the techniques that would be utilized in achieving spending in a repeat player. It should be put into account that the evaluation of the patent would not have the intention of being comprehensive, but would be selective of the particular types and implementation systems associated with the emphasis of the research. As far as the fourth characteristic is concerned that is dealing with feature description, there would be a reading of the patent document and there would be the identification of all references to ‘spend,’ ‘microtransactions,’ ‘purchase,’ and ‘currency.’ The patent description would be extracted in form of direct quotes from the document, with only small alterations being made in particular cases involving elimination of additional systems descriptions supporting the patent, or descriptive illustrations of various implementations. This would be significant for word count and parsimony. In regards to the fifth characteristics talking about perspective of a player, there would be the reframing of the description with the intention of explaining the behavior of a player in accordance with the patent description.

The sales approach would be composed of player data exploitation which is the application of player population or individual data in optimizing the scheduling and type of purchasing discounts or provisions for each of the players, in such a way that significant product conditions like availability and price would be determined or evaluated by the factors that benefit from individual information such as funds availability, instead of factors of basic demand and supply. Limited revelation of the product is the second item of sales approach and would be broadly referring to misrepresentation or non-disclosure of crucial purchase conditions, comprising of long term utility or value of an item purchased, or the features of a product that would not be affected by the analytics of a player. Thirdly, would be adaptive solicitation which would incorporate purchasing of provisions that particular player behaviors would trigger together with other analytics. There would also be the limited possession which would involve providing a player with possession of an item temporarily with the intention of encouraging additional purchasing or urgent use. Finally, is the currency or price manipulation which would involve modification of the pricing of items or the currency value in regards to the analytics of a player or other non-player considerations to inspire purchasing.

How the terms of use would be evaluated

The evaluation of the terms of use would involve analysis of the documents of the terms of use with the objective of pointing out information concerning the product and the measures of consumer protection associated particularly to the video games loot boxes. This kind of evaluation would be concerned with issues regarding consumer protection like statement of a company about restrictions on age, liability for the video games loot boxes, responsibility of the end user, informed consent for the product application, together with compensation and refund entitlements. The evaluation would also be related to information about the product including guarantees like warranty of the game product as well as disclaimers, value disclosure of the product, for example equivalent of monetary value or the other product’s value and the licensing agreements and ownership of the product.

Establishment of the Consumer Protection Concerns associated with Video Games loot boxes

The final part of the methodology would be tailored towards examining the patents of the game and terms of application in relation to the principles of consumer protection and the guarantees and rights of consumers as depicted by the Competition and Consumer Commission (CCC). The objective would be to make a comparison the attributes of video game loot boxes and the fundamental conditions of legality of the purchases of such products with the consumer protection law principle. This would be carried out with the caveat that there is a differences between virtual commodities and tangible goods and services, with the chief differentiation being that game companies claim the virtual goods to be temporarily licensed to players as entertainment only. Besides, there would be a consideration of seven areas of consumer protection including quality acceptability tests, exceptions to a guarantee, entitlement of refund, finding a major challenge with a product, misleading or false impressions of a product, exclusions to a guarantee and remedy claims.