Unlucky timing for Valve, which had to pay around $4 million to Corsair for infringing a patent on its Steam controller controllers.
Valve will pay $4 million to Corsair for the Steam controller for infringing on one of its patents
This story has several backgrounds that led to this sad ending for the folks at Valve. Back in 2014, Ironburg Inventions, who owned the intellectual property within the SCUF company at the time, warned Valve that the “control surfaces on the back” of their Steam controller borrowed a feature that was present in SCUF’s controllers and that was already patented.
SCUF introduced mappable paddles back in 2014, which can be found on Xbox Elite controllers today. The difference is that Microsoft licensed them, while Valve did not. In 2019, Corsair bought SCUF, so all the patents went to that company.
Ironburg Inventions continued the lawsuit and won the case on Feb. 1:
”The U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle unanimously found that Valve Corp. infringed Ironburg’s control patent 8,641,525 and awarded Ironburg more than $4 million. In addition, the jury unanimously found that Valve Corp. willfully infringed the patent…” according to Corsair.
Despite Ironburg Inventions’ (SCUF – Corsair) warnings, Valve continued to produce more Steam controllers, an estimated 1.6 million units. The jury awarded Ironburg Inventions about $4 million in damages. According to the source, further patent infringement lawsuits are not out of the question.
Currently, Valve is developing a new Steam controller that is supposed to combine two completely different worlds, the comfort of console controllers, with the possibilities of a keyboard and mouse in video games, which was not possible with the first model.
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