Immersion, the company that seems to only exist to sue every other company that uses any form of rumble or haptic feedback is at it once again. The company that purchased and accumulated countless patents on rumble technology is now suing Valve.
Immersion is suing Valve with claims that the Half-Life: Alyx developer infringed on various Immersion owned patents in the Steam Deck handheld PC and Valve's VR device aptly named Valve Index. Curiously, Immersion stopped just short of including the Steam Controller in this lawsuit, perhaps due to it no longer being sold.
Immersion's lawsuit cites seven specific patents, which The Verge has kindly tracked down for all of us to take a look at: 7,336,260, 8,749,507, 9,430,042, 9,116,546, 10,627,907, 10,665,067, and 11,175,738. The earliest of these patents date back to the ancient time of 2002. The lawsuit also specifically cites a handful of games that also apparently make use of the technology in question simply by being playable on Steam Deck or Valve Index. Those titles include Half-Life: Alyx, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Warframe, and Star Wars Jedi: Survivor just to name a few.
Immersion has previously gone after most of the industry's major hardware makers. Over the past several years they have filed lawsuits and received settlements from Sony, Microsoft, Apple, google, Motorola, and Fitbit. More recently, Immersion sued Meta. That particular lawsuit was filed a year ago though its outcome has yet to be determined. Like Sony and Microsoft, Nintendo also licenses Immersion technology right now despite them having escaped an Immersion lawsuit. The Verge speculates this is due to the fact that Nintendo's Rumble Pak predates any Immersion owned patents by several years.
While you might be tempted to point out that Valve’s hardware uses a different form of rumble than the ones that Sony and co. got sued for back in the day — linear resonant actuators (LRA), rather than an eccentrically swinging weight on a shaft — that didn’t stop Nintendo from signing an agreement with Immersion to bring its technology to the Switch, which uses LRAs as well. So does Sony’s DualSense, for that matter.​
Once the dust settles from this lawsuit, I honestly would not be too surprised to hear that Valve agrees to a settlement deal with Immersion. If you like, you can take a look at the full lawsuit filed by Immersion (PDF via The Verge).
