The company is currently engaged in litigation with Palm (over the ability of its PDAs to play games against each other over wireless networks) and Cybiko, a company which manufactures a hand-held game device with wireless multiplayer abilities.
The patent application was filed in 1995 and granted by the US patent office in 1997, and is incredibly general in terms of the ground it covers – effectively making it a violation of the patent to connect up any two devices over a wireless connection and play multiplayer games on them.
While Palm and Cybiko are relatively small players in the games business, one rather larger company is bound to be watching these court cases with great interest – namely Nokia, whose forthcoming N-Gage console features wireless multiplayer over Bluetooth or GPRS as a key selling point.
This kind of get rich quick action by holders of such incredibly vague patents isn’t exactly uncommon – especially in the USA, where the patent office seems generally prepared to patent any old rubbish scribbled on the back of a piece of tissue paper – but can sometimes be surprisingly difficult for companies to defend against. In one famous example, BT claimed that it owned a patent covering any use of hyperlinks on webpages – a claim that was thankfully refuted in the end.
It’s pretty unlikely that this patent will stop the ongoing march towards wireless multiplayer gaming – but it could certainly make the owners of Peer-To-Peer Systems somewhat unjustifiably rich.
Source: Gamesindustry.biz, The Register
