In fact this video game seems to have gone through a reduced scrutiny process and I'm hoping they wouldn't somehow be given any sort of patent for how simple this game appears to be. So if it were actually effective and became popular it might end up being easy for competitors to make a substantially similar "generic" version. That's just pure speculation from me though.
Regardless I feel it's irrelevant for now since the claim that this game could actually help kids with ADHD seems baseless to me.
The issue is that the only metric that this game improved was performance on a TOVA assessment[2]. TOVA is itself essentially just an absurdly boring video game: You press a button when the correct target appears, and don't press when incorrect targets appear. I have personal objections to idea that TOVA can really be a reliable indicator of ADHD, but it is approved as one.
The "therapeutic" video game is described in the study as game where half of the gameplay is "a perceptual discrimination targeting task in which users respond to the instructed stimulus targets and ignore the stimulus distractors". Meaning this game is almost literally just the TOVA test but with better graphics. The control game appears to have been a word game along the lines of scrabble. Unsurprisingly, kids who played the first game had more improvement on the TOVA test.
They just developed a game that taught to the test. Of course the results improved.
[1] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/landig/article/PIIS2589-7...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Test_of_Variables_of_Attention
