tl;dr post watch out 
hey everyone. semi-debate topic in here
, very speculative, lots of conjecture. it's about patent expiration and how that will affect music games.
With the lawsuit against EZ2DJ and ITG's integration into "pump pro" I've been thinking about the future of these music games. Konami seems to have a hold on every other company except Harmonix, and it's interesting to wonder how things will play out once their patents finally expire.
First thing I'd like to get into: I think the lifespan of Pop'n and IIDX is more limited than people would intuitively think. I'm saying this mainly because of the release dates between games. If Pop'n = more popular than IIDX, then Pop'ns popularity should indicate IIDX's to some extent.
Look here:
Pop'n Music - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Notice that prior to Iroha they were releasing two games a year. Now they're releasing one. Sometimes this pattern breaks, but for Pop'n it's pretty consistent.
You can see where I'm going with this. Pop'n, IIDX, and other Konami incarnations are likely to face a bleak future. Probably not within the next few years, but sometime around 2011-2013.
Should you be concerned? Well, not really. Why? Because Beatmania was made in 1997 and Pop'n was made in 1998. If it takes them at least 6 months to make the game, it means that their patent was probably filed sometime around 1997 or 1996. That means that, if Pop'n and IIDX start dying in 2011-2013, then it will only be 5 years or less until the patents on Konami's games start expiring.
What would happen if Konami's patents no longer loomed over the industry? Well, the content of the games themselves would get a lot more competitive. Right now Konami doesn't have anything to worry about. They can have as little or as much content as they choose to have - people would still play it. The same can't be said for when they have competitors, and ITG proved this. So, if Pop'n dies by 2013, then it's likely that something similar to Pop'n would come out, legally, by 2017 or later, with the idea of reviving that concept.
That's just what
I expect to happen though. I could be dead wrong. What do you think will happen?
patent expiration and revived interest in music games? 
