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.
LiveScience.org mentions the same question back in 2020
I couldn’t find an answer though. Most online sources of the discovery are from back in 2020, then it’s just memes.