Posts Tagged: "Gaming Technology"

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.

The predictions on the success of Nintendo’s (TYO:7974) newest game platform, the Nintendo Switch, have varied over the last six months. According to interactive media and digital gaming research firm SuperData Research, Nintendo took a big hit on console sales of Wii U in 2012 when it sold only 15 million copies and reaped criticism from investors. Despite that, Takashi Mochizuki, a Wall Street Journal technology reporter stationed in Tokyo, tweeted in October that Nintendo President Tatsumi Kimishima expected two million units to be shipped within the first month of Nintendo Switch’s release in March 2017.

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.

A developer asserting trade dress protection must, therefore, establish that a game’s design does not yield a utilitarian advantage by demonstrating that “the product feature serves no purpose other than identification of the game developer.” A developer must also identify alternative designs that offer the same functional features as the asserted trade dress. Alternative designs available to competitors ensure that a developer is not monopolizing a useful or aesthetically pleasing game feature.