Quote:Corsair Gaming, Inc. (NASDAQ:CRSR) (“Corsair”), a leading global provider and innovator of high-performance gear for gamers and content creators and its subsidiaries Scuf Gaming and Ironburg Inventions Ltd., announce that on February 1, 2021 in the patent infringement case, Ironburg Inventions Ltd. v. Valve Corp, US District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle the jury unanimously found that Valve Corp infringed Ironburg’s 8,641,525 controller patent and awarded Ironburg over $4 million. In addition, the jury unanimously found willful infringement by Valve Corp. The jury verdict of willful infringement is the first step to a potential award of enhanced damages up to the statutory limit of treble damages.

Quote:Long story short, in designing and producing the Steam Controller, Valve knowingly infringed on patents that were the property of Ironburg Inventions, a sub-firm of SCUF. Ironburg Inventions warned Valve about this in 2014, but Valve continued to sell the Steam controller, a total of 1.6-million units, before hitting the kill switch.

Corsair acquired SCUF in 2019 and picked up the fight. The culprit: the rear-facing side controls. Valve could have avoided all this by licensing the technology from SCUF, just like Microsoft has for select Xbox controllers, including the Xbox Elite controller.

Quote:Corsair Gaming has recently filed an initial public offering with a target price of $100 million and will be treated as an emerging growth company. The company intends to list on the Nasdaq under the CRSR symbol. The IPO filing offers some insight into the financial position of Corsair however, many exact dollar values have been withheld in the public filing. Corsair Gaming has sold over 190 million products since 1998 with 85 million of those being sold in the last five years.
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Corsair also provided an interesting insight into who they consider to be their various competitors in various markets:

• Gaming keyboards & mice - Logitech, Razer
  
• Gaming headsets & audio products - Logitech, Razer, Kingston (HyperX)
  
• Gaming & creator streaming gear - Logitech, AVerMedia
  
• Gaming controllers - Microsoft, Logitech
  
• Power supplies, cooling solutions & computer cases - Cooler Master, NZXT, EVGA, Seasonic, Thermaltake
  
• Memory modules - G.Skill, Kingston (HyperX), Micron (Crucial)
  
• Prebuilt gaming computers & laptops - Dell (Alienware), HP (Omen), ASUS, Razer
  
• Custom gaming computers - iBuypower, Cyberpower
  

The IPO doesn't have an intended filling date and the $100 million listed in the offering may very well be a placeholder so we will likely see various changes in the coming weeks.

Quote:The transition will be gradual; starting this October, new accounts will have to be linked through Facebook. Existing standalone Oculus accounts will still be supported; however, they will only be grandfathered until 2023. According to Facebook, they'll still allow users to run their content on these accounts; but any new apps and content that's acquired for the system after then will not be available for usage in such scenarios. Facebook further said that some content might stop working by then, due to integration of some applications' backends with Facebook-bound accounts, capabilities and servers. And thus, Facebook will finally be fully integrated with Oculus, ensuring a new ecosystem of users, and thus, new data on which to base their publicity and marketing efforts. It's all about the value a user brings; and perhaps some social network integration with your VR environments. Because nothing makes more sense than creating Facebook-bound communities in the VR space, and seeing a Like emote pop up on your most recent spaceflight maneuver.

Quote:With this information in mind, many countries have already or are in the process of examining changing policies regarding loot boxes. The UK’s House of Lords just announced that thy support treating loot boxes as gambling and implementing regulatory changes immediately.

Dr. David Zendle, an expert who spoke to the panel, said that there is an “extraordinarily robust” link between problem gambling and loot boxes. He didn’t claim a casual link, but stated there is a link nonetheless. According to Paul Slovic, Ph.D. & President of Decision Research, human brains make quick assessments of odds, but the amygdala, our emotional centre, can cloud our ability to rationally assess probability. Children and youth’s cerebral cortex, the logical part of the brain, is under developed, and their amygdala’s aren’t entirely stable yet. This is a double whammy for making bad decisions, even if they meaningfully understand what odds represent.

The Lords say they should be classified as “games of chance” – which would bring them under the Gambling Act 2005.

The report states “If a product looks like gambling and feels like gambling, it should be regulated as gambling” and that “The government must act immediately to bring loot boxes within the remit of gambling legislation and regulation”.

They also state that the regulations they desire “could be enacted today” as they don’t require legislation.

They also raise the risk of eSports betting and the risk it presents to youth.

Quote:Source Code of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Team Fortress 2 got leaked today. It seems like Valve hasn't been careful with control of its output, and a few leaks came out. All of the licensees of the Source Engine, a multi-platform game engine used in all Valve's games like Dota 2, Half-Life, and CS: GO, have been empowered by Valve with access to the source code of 2017/2018 versions of CS: GO and Team Fortress 2. Someone down the line, however, took that opportunity and access to leak the source code. The original news source is the SteamDB Twitter account, so we don't have any link to the actual source code.

This pretty big news since CS: GO can be considered as the most popular game on the Steam platform, and IP that Valve holds on it is very valuable. The 2017/2018 version that is leaked is probably outdated by a mile now, but it still represents an act of theft and should be treated as such. We are yet to see the response from Valve and how they will handle this situation.

Quote:The Steam Controller was all the hype early in development, but ultimately it saw few adopters and far less love than the community was expecting Consequently, it’s no surprise that Valve has announced that it won’t be making any more. This comes just a year after Valve discontinued Steam Link. It’s not all bad, though. If you’re quick, you can still grab one for just $5.
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Hilariously, the shipping costs more than the controller itself, so the purchase will end up costing you $13 – but even that’s still a great price. Quantities are limited, and Valve is reporting a longer delivery time than usual, so be fast if you still want to score one.

Quote:Electronic Arts (EA) famously bailed on Valve’s popular Steam platform years ago in favor of its own Origin digital storefront. At the time, EA had some of the most popular gaming franchises like Call of Duty and Mass Effect to lure people over to Origin. Today, EA has given up on keeping its walled garden exclusive and will begin launching games on Steam once again. It starts next month with Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order.

EA has started promoting pre-orders for Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, but it’s directing gamers to Steam. That’s quite a change after funneling customers to Origin for the better part of a decade. This is the first major Star Wars release for EA since Battlefront II, which attracted widespread criticism due to its use of loot boxes. Fallen Order is a single-player game, so there are fewer opportunities for EA to nickel and dime players. Although, there are still pre-order bonuses and a “deluxe” edition of the game.

Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order will run you $60 (or $70 for the deluxe edition) on Steam or EA’s Origin service. Yes, that still exists, but EA is casting its net as wide as possible now. That might have something to do with the launch of the Epic Store, which has the advantage of hosting the massively popular Fortnite. Should you decide to buy Fallen Order from Steam, you’ll still need to run Origin on your PC to authenticate the game’s DRM.
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EA and Valve are still working on the technical details of linking their platforms, so this is not a full list of the games that will come to Steam. While you won’t be able to transfer games purchased on one store to the other, EA confirms that Origin and Steam will support cross-platform multiplayer for titles that are sold on both. Additional integrations may come later.

Quote:Jokes about GameStop offering people a fraction of a game's worth during trade-ins aside, one of the clear advantages physical copies of games have had over their digital counterparts is the ability to resell them, allowing players to recoup some of their investment when they're done with a title. But that might change. Earlier this week, the Paris District Court ruled that Steam's restrictions on reselling digital games violate European Union (EU) regulations earlier this week.
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The court gave Steam owner Valve three months to amend Steam's terms of service to comply with EU regulations. The changes will probably take longer to go into effect, however, as the case heads to appeal. A company spokesperson told Polygon: "We disagree with the decision of the Paris Court of First Instance and will appeal it. The decision will have no effect on Steam while the case is on appeal." That process could take years to resolve.
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It's clear that the EU has taken an interest in the way digital games are sold and managed. People can resell their physical games, movies and albums. The only reason they can't do the same for their digital copies is the fact that companies only sell access to the product in question; the idea that someone actually owns the product is an illusion. Arguing in favor of resales is one step closer towards guaranteeing true ownership of digital goods.

Quote:Update 4/5/19, 9:20 a.m. PT: Valve sent us a statement in response to the European Commission's announcement. The company reiterated that the commission's issues don't involve sales through Steam, just Steam activation keys used by physical copies of games and said it neither receives compensation directly from the companies nor a portion of sales for providing this service.

More important is the company's claim that few titles were affected by geo-blocking, that it shouldn't be subject to any penalties for providing a platform on which other companies did wrong and that the commission's complaint arrived a few years late:
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The European Commission announced today that it sent Statements of Objections to Valve, Bandai Namco, Capcom, Focus Home, Koch Media and ZeniMax for "geo-blocking" Steam activation keys for physical copies of games (which do, in fact, still exist) based on national borders.
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The European Commission said Valve and the game publishers agreed to block cross-border sales involving "Czechia, Estonia, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, Slovakia and in some cases Romania." All of the publishers except Capcom also included export restrictions in their contracts with other game distributors that "may have prevented consumers from purchasing and playing PC video games sold by these distributors."

These restrictions are said to violate Article 101 of the Treaty on the Functioning of the European Union via Regulation 2018/302, which prohibits geo-blocking, which is why the commission sent these Statements of Objections. That regulation went into effect in December 2018, but the commission's investigation into Valve and these game publishers actually started in February 2017. Now the companies have a chance to respond.

Quote:That list is supposed to do exactly what it says: give people an easy way to find games that are coming out soon and have attracted lots of attention. But game developer Mike Rose revealed on Twitter that the Popular Upcoming list uses a back-end release date that can differ from the date shown on a title's Steam page. Changing this date can help get a game on this list. PCGamesN first reported on the tweets.

"Here's the thing: You can set any date for your game's release in the Steam backend, and it means nothing," Rose explained in one of his tweets about the issue. "You can set a date, and let it go by. Then you can set another date, and let it go by again. Setting this date has no meaning -- except for appearing in the Upcoming list."

Developers can use this otherwise useless date to make sure their game appears on Steam's front page, then, without consequence. Rose said it's also easy to set that date and then forget to change it when a game is all-but-inevitably delayed.
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As it should: being featured on Steam can mean the difference between wasting years of work on a game that didn't get the right promotion and actually seeing a return on that investment. It's not an enviable position to be in--except for the part where Valve makes money no matter what games are popular--but at least it seems like the company's thinking about how to solve this.

Quote:A DigiTimes report today indicates that even though the gaming notebook market is expected to grow in 2019, it won't grow at as quick a rate as before. Meanwhile, gaming motherboards and graphics cards will stay flat for the year, and gaming desktops will "hardly grow significantly," according to the report.

DigiTimes cited "industry sources" and said the gaming notebook market is projected to grow 10 percent throughout 2019. In any other category that would be considered a success, especially with so many other device types declining in sales, but that's a huge drop from the 20 percent annual growth the market has enjoyed for the last 6-7 years, the publication's sources said.
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When you consider all of those factors, a 50 percent drop in growth for the gaming laptop segment, mild growth for gaming desktops and flat growth for gaming motherboards and graphics cards seem more like a small miracle than a disaster.