Comment on Gabe Newell, the Man Behind Steam, Is Working on a Brain-Computer Interface
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 5 months agoI hadn't heard of most of this, and it's sort of an avalanche, so I picked out one particular part to check out in a lot of detail and see if it held up.
The controller was stolen IP
Looks to me like they had buttons on the back of the controller in some way which infringed on one of 105 patents that SCUF holds on specific parts of controller design, and they sued Valve a year after Valve had stopped using the design anyway.
I'm not qualified to say whether SCUF actually invented something no one else would have thought of, and then Valve deliberately copied them on the buttons, but I'm skeptical. I lean a little more towards the side of "SCUF patented something somewhat obvious, and then wanted Valve to pay them rent in order to set their buttons up in a sensible fashion."
But at the very least, saying that it's demonstrated that it was "stolen" is, to me, not accurate.
and is still currently fighting the lawsuit
This part is objectively not true, unless there's some glacially slow appeals process I'm not aware of. It looks like the whole thing finished in 2021. Am I missing something?
averyminya@beehaw.org 5 months ago
I’ve had conversations with this person before, in my opinion many of the things they fault Valve for are… extreme nitpicking.
Also, IMO Corsair’s patents are BS and are drastically inhibiting accessibility controller availability. Their stranglehold on something as simple as buttons on the backside of a controller shouldn’t be lauded.
mozz@mbin.grits.dev 5 months ago
Yeah. I was around in the games industry way back when the big publishers had a total stranglehold on the whole arena, and Steam was this magic thing that enabled non-AAA games to actually break in in a big way and achieve sales above the double digits, and on top of that I generally like Valve's games. I was sort of wondering if this is a "live long enough to see yourself become the villain" type of thing, where my good feelings towards Valve aren't warranted anymore in the present day.
But, judging by what I saw when I grabbed one of this person's assertions at random and held it up to the light to examine in it detail for objective truth, I don't think it's based on a reasoned and objective basis. What it is based on, I have no idea.