Valve can afford it with all the money they make from kids gambling on their games

edit: Valve makes $54M/month with their csgo gambling cases

It's an electric motor spinning a lopsided piece of metal. Primitive caveman "tech" that was known about before that company existed. They're a patent troll.

It’s one of those games where dying takes you way, way back. When the game is well balanced, I don’t mind, but this one is pretty easy as you go along and then the boss is so much more difficult than anything before. So you die and start over and do it again and again. But because the initial part of the game is pretty easy, you don’t really get much better in the lead up to the first boss.

Normally developers include accessibility controls to make the game enjoyable for everybody, but the Returnal developers didn’t. They want you to play their way, or not at all. I ended up choosing the latter. They got my money though, so I suppose in the end, they won.

While Valve’s hardware uses a different form of rumble than the ones that Sony and co. got sued for back in the day — linear resonant actuators (LRA), rather than an eccentrically swinging weight on a shaft — that didn’t stop Nintendo from signing an agreement with Immersion to bring its technology to the Switch, which uses LRAs as well. So does Sony’s DualSense, for that matter.

immersion didn't invent LRAs. their claim is that the use of LRAs vs swinging weights is irrelevant; that any vibration haptics via any means would constitute a patent infringement.

ex. 1: Global game jam game where one player has to only use rumble to achieve thier goal, the dev then went to make games for blind people, and rumble is still very much part of them. It definitely feels gimmicky but it kinda opened my eye to the fact that people perceive different parts of games in different ways, depending on their disabilities

ex 2: in Beat saber, rumble tells you when your controller hits something, it becomes such an important part of the experience that when my index controllers lost rumble I had to quit playing. Without being able to watch everywhere at all times, the haptic feedback becomes vital to knowing if you hit that note you were aiming for while focusing elsewhere.

This discourages competition from smaller outlets, and thus allows the big players fewer competitors. Though, again, pure speculation on my part.

And importantly, they don't want their own patents invalidated. They don't want legal precedents that weaken their own IP rights.

Nothing's different: https://ir.immersion.com/news-releases/news-release-details/...

You can only patent actual inventions, not ideas. So you can't just patent "touch screens which feel like a physical keyboard", but how your specific implementation of that works.

Don't mix theory and reality.

How many Steam Decks have actually shipped to date compared to the current generation of consoles? Reservations do not count.

Please give a verifiable and credible source.

> Some websites are now quoting 3 million by now, although I don't know how they came to that number, but if the 1M figure of Oct2022 is realistic (I believe it is), then 3M by now does feel reasonable too.

Given we both don't know about how they derived those figures I can only see this as a pure speculation and I'm afraid that I would have to unfortunately dismiss those guesses and estimations, unless they have verified sources. Even better if it is directly from Steam themselves.

Your tone, the word actually and your final quip about them "being scared" says it all.

Question now is, what's your deal? Invested in a narrative where Steam Deck isn't a success?

It's really a genuine question since it is true that Steam doesn't reveal their Steam Deck sales and figures on this, yet we are already assuming it is a 'success' without benchmarking their performance against the existing generation of gaming consoles.

Assuming you have the figures, do you know what they are and how it compares to the current generation of games consoles on the market?

Unless these patents will be invalidated, this company will be able to sue any other company for 27 whole years for "thing vibrates when you touch it", "thing vibrates based on what's on the screen", "thing vibrates when you touch if (but with an algorithm somewhere)", "thing vibrates when something happens", "thing vibrates when you move your finger", or "thing vibrates when you push".

This is legal extortion.

1. A computer-readable medium having instructions, the instructions including instructions that cause a processor to:

detect a first pressure on a first input device;

provide a first tactile sensation to the first input device, the first tactile sensation based at least in part on the first pressure;

[...][0]

In general any patent that doesn't help the reader recreate the invention should not be valid. They should be more like instruction manuals "describing the said invention or discovery, clearly, truly and fully,"[1] rather than a list of vague ideas.

[0]https://patents.google.com/patent/US7336260B2

[1]https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/United_States_Statutes_at_Lar...