Valve's Steam Deck is one of the hottest consoles on the market these days. It lets owners take the majority of their PC library on the go, giving them an easy way to play all kinds of different genres untethered from their desktops. With all that success comes even more eyeballs on the company, and it looks like at least one of those eyeballs has found something that could be problematic for Valve. Immersion, a company that's been cornering the market on rumble tech over the last few years, thinks that Valve is infringing on one of its patents with several of its products.
The Verge first spotted the lawsuit filed by Immersion. It alleges that Valve is, as mentioned above, infringing on its patents with not just the Steam Deck, but also the Valve Index VR platform, its SteamVR software, and Half-Life: Alyx, among other things. The lawsuit was filed on May 15 and sees Immersion asking for damages, royalties, and an injunction against Valve "from deploying, operating, maintaining, testing, and using the Accused Handheld Instrumentalities and Accused VR Instrumentalies."
This case from Immersion does seem to be a bit of a pickle for Valve. We're no legal experts, but considering that Immersion has brought similar lawsuits to major players in the tech industry like Apple, Google, Sony, and Microsoft thathave all ended with those companies settling, it certainly appears that they have a decent chance of that happening here too. The Verge did point out that Valve's hardware does use a different type of rumble than some of those other cases, but even still, it does seem that Immersion at least has a solid leg to stand on.
This is, of course, not the first time Valve has been in the news for lawsuits lately. In April 2021, Wolfire Games filed an antitrust lawsuit against the company, saying that its rules requiring developers to pay a 30% commission if they wanted to release something on Steam would stifle competition. That case remains ongoing, so it seems like Valve's lawyers will be busy in the courts for the foreseeable future.
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