Posts Tagged: "gaming"

While countless industries have been forced to adapt to the COVID-19 pandemic, the video game industry has been on a winning streak. Historic numbers of people have turned to video games for social connection, competitive sport, and everything in between. By the numbers, one in three people on the planet play video games and, this week, millions of those people tuned into E3, the premiere event for game players and game creators alike.

Gamestatix intends to release an ERC-20 token that can be deployed on an Ethereum blockchain. Launched in 2014, this technology makes it possible for Gamestatix to pay in a cryptocurrency that could then be transferred more readily than Bitcoin. The difference between the two is that Bitcoin is only a currency while Ethereum is an application platform through which companies can build new programs. Both use blockchaining technology, but Ethereum’s allows for complex applications in a “smart contract” which can automate certain operations.

As an industry, gaming and eSports can typically adopt new technologies far quicker than say financial or logistics industries – so aspects of blockchain technology can be expected in eSports very soon. This is due, in part, to the age of the eSports audience which is typically very young, and therefore tech-savvy. Major eSports events now attract more viewers and fans than traditional sporting events, and around $4.6BN was generated last year by gaming content on live and on-demand video services. By 2019, the eSports audience is expected to grow to around 330,000,000 people.

Japanese gaming firm Universal Entertainment Corporation (TYO:6425) filed a complaint alleging patent infringement and other claims against Las Vegas, NV-based entity Aruze Gaming America as well as Kazuo Okada, the founder of Universal Entertainment (UEC) and the sole shareholder and director of Aruze Gaming. The suit, filed in the District of Nevada, alleges that Okada directed patent infringing activities of Aruze while he was also an officer with UEC.

Recently, eSports have exploded in popularity to the point that college conferences, such as the Big 10, are now fielding eSports teams. Patented technologies and partnerships in the eSports field have been developed to take advantage of this boom as well. However, there are problems with enforcing IP rights, both because the patents could be potentially held as ineligible subject matter and the ownership rights for the IP are difficult to determine.

On January 4, 2017 Linksys announced it had teamed up with Rivet Networks and effectively brought the Killer Mode technology directly into a router that is needed to prioritize algorithms coming from the computer to the network. But the networking technologies seen in the Linksys WRT32x router demonstrate only one aspect of Belkin International’s developments in this sector. Belkin is the parent company ob Linksys, and its technologies enable better network management for devices including gaming PCs or mobile devices, as can be seen by U.S. Patent No. 9497196 titled IOT Device Environment Detection, Identification and Caching. This patent describes a process in which network devices can determine the status of other devices, such as mobile phones, and continuously update that status through a network.

One product in each category receives a Best of Innovation award as the most innovative product in its category. Today, we’ll take a stroll through some of the consumer tech products which have been recognized as the Best of Innovation at CES 2017.

Unfortunately for Hasbro, not all of its activities in the mobile gaming business have been completely original, leaving the game developer open to legal challenges. In late October, it was reported that Hasbro was named as a defendant in a copyright infringement action filed by Turkey-based gaming developer Peak Games in the San Francisco courthouse of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California (N.D. Cal.). At the center of Peak Games’ complaint is Hasbro’s My Little Pony: Puzzle Party mobile game app, which Peak Games alleges is essentially a clone of that firm’s Toy Blast game.

This year’s edition of the consumer trade show featured many companies which had placed a firm focus on the development of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) technologies. Modern-day virtual reality technologies can perhaps be traced back to American computer scientist Ivan Sutherland who created the world’s earliest stereoscopic headset, the Sword of Damocles, in the late 1960s. With the long-awaited Oculus Rift virtual reality headset about to hit consumer markets in 2016, this year’s CES became a large opportunity for rival firms to stake their claim before the consumer market for virtual reality technologies begins to mature.

Microsoft is often found soaring high atop the intellectual property world in terms of the patents it’s issued by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office. In 2014, the company was 5th overall in the world for U.S. patent grants with 2,983 patents that year, a 6 percent increase from the previous year’s totals. In the three months leading up to this writing, Microsoft has earned 597 U.S. patents, a slow quarterly pace compared to last year but still one that would likely put the company in the top 10 most innovative organizations this year.

The EFF wants an exemption for people who want to modify their purchased games in order to bypass access controls when a publisher shuts down the server. Specifically, the EFF would like for any piece of software with server-based functions that are shut down by a publisher or developer to be considered “abandoned” six months later. This means that someone who owns a copy of a game that no longer has an online play component would be able to modify the game to eliminate authentication checks or access controls in the game itself so they can still play online using a third party server. This may also include reverse engineering and making intermediate copies of the game, which goes well beyond the skill set of the casual user.

Microsoft pays a premium for R&D but its investment has paid off as the company currently holds one of the world’s strongest patent portfolios. Just recently the company decided to flex this patent muscle in a big way by filing a patent lawsuit against Kyocera; Microsoft is seeking an injunction. The company was 5th overall during 2014 in terms of patents granted by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office with 2,829 U.S. patents last year. That’s a slight rise from Microsoft’s 2,814 U.S. patents in 2013, which was good for a 6th place finish in that year.