I don’t think that you can patent game mechanics in the US, have read about that before, but it sounds like this lawsuit is in Japan, and their IP system may not work the same way.

EDIT: Sorry, I’m wrong. It’s that game rules aren’t covered by copyright, that’s what I was remembering.

All Gameplay patents are bullshit. Artificial barriers to entry that only restrict market forces in favor of screwing end consumers.

And also not legal

Sega alleges infringements of the following five patents: No. 5930111, No. 6402953, No. 6891987, No. 7297361 and No. 7411307, all of which are registered in Japan.

I tried checking out that first patent there, 5930111 and who boy… is this shit hard to read

An information processing device includes: a control means for causing the player to acquire a content in response to a game execution instruction from the player; an extraction means for extracting content groups of the same type from contents possessed by the player, according to an instruction from the player; a selection means for automatically selecting fusion source contents and resource contents from each of the extracted content groups; and a fusion means for collectively fusing, for each of the fusion source contents, one of the resource contents of the same type as the each of the fusion source contents. The selection means selects, as the resource contents, contents having a rarity at or below a specific level, from each of the extracted content groups.