As the generations age, more and more adults are playing computer games. In my "adult life" I have played a lot of games and only completed two or three.

The reason for this are complicated controls and level of skills required to continue an interrupted game.

Let's take GTA IV. It's a nice game. The controls are kinda advanced and difficulty of the levels raises as the game progresses. An adult person with a job and a family can play a game like GTA few nights a week and complete some of the missions. Then something happens and there is a pause. Maybe your kid gets sick or you have a busy period at work.

After a while, I would like to pick up the game and continue the progress. But then I find out, that I have forgotten some of the controls and some skills have been lost and the game kicks my ass. After a few failed missions the frustrations takes over and I turn of the PS3 and never pick up GTA IV again.

As a busy adult with work and family, I do not need more frustrations from a computer game after a long day at work.

Royalties and closed markeds are nice to have for a company, but there is more to it.

I fully understand Microsoft and other large companies. They "arm themselfes" with patents and use them in the same way as strategic nuclear weapons are used by governments.

Every big business has to aquire as many patents as possible for everything they can think of. If they don't have them, they are sitting duck and can easily be ruined by lawsuits from other players.

Every company is infringing patents owned by others, because basically everything useful is being patented. There is a fragile equilibrium, because everybody is affraid to start lawsuits, knowing that a counter lawsuit will be launched against you.

This is how patents are used today. The big companies are not the ones to blame. The patent system made this behaviour possible, so it has to be fixed.