It’s not over yet, but it’s inching nearer to the end.
According to Games Fray’s Florian Mueller (via VGC), the non-final rejection — meaning Nintendo has two months to respond (or more if it choses) — the USPTO has rejected all 26 claims made in the patent, which essentially revokes it, unless Nintendo chooses to respond.
There is innovation in every Nintendo system.
The Wii U had dual screen and asymmetric games.
The 3DS had a 3D screen, a couple AR games, and Street Pass.
The Switch is the first console with a docking station and being able to dynamically change the graphics settings without having to restart running software.
The Switch 2 has multiple mouse controls.
All of them are a bit gimmicky, none are totally original, and most of them did not really catch on, but you cannot fault them for trying. What innovations have there been in PC, PlayStation, and XBox? VR headsets and DLSS?
I absolutely refuse to get a Switch 2 considering so much of what Nintendo has been doing especially lately, that being said the mouse controls I felt were potentially huge and I’m surprised to hear they’re not catching on. Nintendo’s own gimmick game for it obviously looked okay at best but more realistically a tech demo, but I felt like it could have been fantastic for plenty of genres.
FPS games on the S2 now could have much better viewing controls while still having analog movement (primary reason I use gamepad for GTA on PC is because I primarily play with vehicles and I vastly prefer analog movement instead of WASD for driving and flying), games that have occasionally intense menuing can swap between using the joycon and mouse mode quite easily (for instance MH when building armor sets), and games that are almost exclusively menuing (RTS’s effectively dead as they may be as a genre) could control much better on console than they historically have before.
I felt like the mouse sensor had a lot of potential for making existing games feel so much better to actually play especially for PC players as opposed to things like the dreaded joystick controlled cursor or slow viewing rotation in comparison to potentially very snappy mouse controls.