Patents system mentioned in July newsletter

[jztemple]

Just saw this in the July newsletter:

What’s coming next?
I’m just putting the finishing touches on the patents system. Patents allow you to protect your drug formulas stopping competitors from producing the same products… at a cost.

This opens up a number of interesting strategies:

Patent everything - safe but expensive, need to focus on a few high value products with excellent margins.
No patent approach - save money from patents and invest them into getting access to new cures. But what if an AI manages to patent your wonder cure?
Defensive - only patent products that AIs gain access to, best of both worlds but potentially risky.

There will be different patent lengths available. The longer the patent, the more expensive and the longer it takes to apply. Will you take a cheap, safe 1 year patent or go for a massive 5 year one and run the risk of a competitor getting in before you?

I’ve only had a game a few days, so I’m still new to a lot of the gameplay, but this actually addressed one of my concerns. I felt like I wasn’t interacting enough with the competition. Glad to see that there is going to be more depth to the game. I’ve been posting about Big Pharma on my own “local” gaming forum and it’s nice to be able to offer up new stuff.