(underlined legal terms point to entries in our IP Lingo dictionary)
Context: Game publishers and videogame jhardware makers regularly get sued over patents, sometimes by competitors and more frequently by those seeking royalties. In December, IBM settled its patent disputes with Zynga and its parent company, Take-Two (January 2, 2025 games fray article). Nintendo, which just lost a Super Mario trademark (not patent) battle in Costa Rica against a small company (February 2, 2025 games fray article), is suing Palworld maker Pocketpair in Japan (January 26, 2025 games fray article). Nintendo is being sued in Europe’s Unified Patent Court (UPC) by a different entity that wants to collect license fees (October 22, 2024 ip fray article). In that dispute, the asserted patents used to belong to BlackBerry.
What’s new: On Friday (January 31, 2025), Resonant Systems, a company doing business as RevelHMI, made two different filings in the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Texas. In a dispute with Sony that began in 2023, a settlement is imminent and the court was asked to stay the case for another two weeks so the parties can work out the remaining details. On the same day, RevelHMI brought a fresh complaint against Nintendo, accusing the Switch of infringing a haptic feedback patent. The complaint says RevelHMI previously reached out to Nintendo but couldn’t strike a license deal.
Direct impact: This dispute is clearly just about money. Given that Nintendo declined to license RevelHMI’s patents, it could be that the videogame hardware maker intends to defend itself up to a certain point, but a settlement is still the most likely outcome.
Wider ramifications: RevelHMI filed a parallel lawsuit against Meta, but in the Western District of Texas, where it is already suing Apple. A case against Samsung has been pending in the Eastern District of Texas.
Resonant Systems is a startup founded in 2019 that received well over a million dollars in venture funding. It could be that it never managed to make an actual product. In any event, it is now asserting patents against large technology companies, and apparently with some success, at least to the extent that Sony presumably agreed to pay up.
The patent-in-suit in the new Nintendo case is U.S. Patent No. 8.860,337 (“Linear vibration modules and linear-resonant vibration modules”).
The Eastern and Western Districts of Texas are both very popular venues among patent holders, and particularly (though not exclusively) among non-practicing entities. also called patent assertion entities or, pejoratively, patent trolls.
The following claim chart is attached to the complaint and compares the patent claim to the accused product, the Switch:
Here’s the complaint to which that claim chart is attached:
And, finally, here’s the filing that shows RevelHMI and Sony believe they just need a little bit more time to settle their case: