Valve was ordered to pay $ 4 million in damages for allegedly infringing patents with the Steam Controller. Ironburg Inventions, a company that owns patents for the controlling brand SCUF Gaming, claimed that it warned Valve about the infringement in 2014.
Ironburg obtained a patent in 2014 for a controller that “has two additional controls located at the rear in positions to be operated by a user’s middle fingers”. The Steam Controller had buttons on the back in that position.
SCUF Gaming are manufacturers of custom controllers, several of which feature resettable buttons on the rear according to the patent.
“Valve knew that his conduct involved an irrational risk of violation, but he simply went on to infringe anyway – the classic story of David and Goliath: Goliath does what Goliath wants to do,” argued the Ironburg lawyer, as reported by Videogames Chronicle.
This argument would probably sound better if SCUF and Ironburg Inventions had not been purchased by hardware giant Corsair last year. They are quite Goliath themselves.
Patent stories like that always seem like a shame to me. A large company should not be able to copy and profit from the work of a smaller one, but the concept of “buttons on the back of a controller” should be too broad and obvious to receive a patent. The execution of this idea on Steam Controller also seems to me to be different from that of SCUF Gaming, in form, if not in function. I was not on the jury for this trial, however.
I have a thing for my Steam Controller, mainly because my son, when he was younger, liked the “di-do di-do” beeps that he did when you turned it on. Otherwise, I haven’t used it in years. Valve discontinued the controller in 2019.