Valve to lose $4 million for patent infringement with the Steam Controller

There's just something about a physical stick that can't be replaced with a touchpad.

My thoughts as well. The touchpad can be nice for a casual game, but trying to move or turn with it quickly and accurately in an intense boss fight (say for example Dark Souls 3, or Hellpoint) is impossible.

I've finished DS3 recently using the Steam Controller. Practice makes perfect.

I certainly feel like I can aim far more precisely with the Steam controller.
The only games I can't get used to on the Steam controller are basically Twin Stick shooters. For them it is truly awful!

Practice makes perfect.

Quite the definition of a Souls like game, if I'm not wrong?

I can't find any gaming controllers on Corsair's website. What's the point of a patent if you never use it? Patent trolling?

They even acquired SCUF Gaming, saying in their press release that "CORSAIR®, a world leader in high-performance gaming peripherals and enthusiast components, is pleased to announce that it has agreed to acquire high-performance controller pioneer SCUF Gaming "SCUF®" and its extensive patent portfolio."

So more patent trolling in the future? That's just lame.

There's just something about a physical stick that can't be replaced with a touchpad.

My thoughts as well. The touchpad can be nice for a casual game, but trying to move or turn with it quickly and accurately in an intense boss fight (say for example Dark Souls 3, or Hellpoint) is impossible.

It may have something to do with the presets you're using. I don't know about these specific games, but some are using joystick emulation (Mouse Joystick), which is a comfy way to play casual games, but terrible for those needing precision.

What you need is the Mouse style of input, but even so the preset might not be suitable for you. I personally never found a default or community preset that's working for me, even among those with hundreds of upvotes.
I spent some time perfecting one for my needs and I'm using that for all the games (ofc, with modifications when needed). It behaves more like a ball mouse. Don't know if you ever used a ball mouse, they sucked for a number of reasons, but they had one good feature not present in modern mice. And this was the ability to make ample movements just by a short flick of the wrist while raising it a bit from the pad (basically letting the ball inertia to complete the move) and then putting it back quickly at the precise point you needed. Took a bit of practice but worked perfectly, the same with the Steam Controller.

That doesn't mean that it would work for you, but it goes to show how configurable and versatile the Steam Controller is. And honestly, this is one of the reasons for which some gamers are repelled by it.
They are faced with presets unsuitable for them, and configuring it might feels too much of a chore to deal with it.


Last edited by dubigrasu on 4 February 2021 at 2:04 pm UTC

There's just something about a physical stick that can't be replaced with a touchpad.

My thoughts as well. The touchpad can be nice for a casual game, but trying to move or turn with it quickly and accurately in an intense boss fight (say for example Dark Souls 3, or Hellpoint) is impossible.

I can't imagine what joystick-only controller could be better. Granted I haven't used too many, just the Xbox versions and PS 3 ones, but I expect most others are similar. No matter how "fast" I might set "joystick sensitivity," I'm still constrained by a pre-set speed (firmware? software? I truly don't know).

But I'm not here to dis non-Steam controllers. What I've just written may only prove how ignorant of I am of contemporary controller technology. I'm here to say that the Steam Controller can indeed move as fast and accurately as anyone could ever want, but not with just any controller configuration.

On my SC (which I almost always set-up using mouse and keyboard settings) I am constrained only by the speed I can swipe my thumb across the pad. I always set my right pad as a trackball mouse without any friction, and I always set its sensitivity so that when I swipe my thumb from one side of the pad to the other, I turn 180 degrees in game and, if I don't lift my finger, I stop on a dime. Swipe. Stop. Very fast. Very accurate.

With time I've grown so accustomed to this mechanic that I can do a quick swipe in any direction, lift my thumb a micro-second, free spin a ways, and then touch the pad and stop anywhere between 0 and 359 degrees.

Again, I'm only saying all this to say that it is possible to be incredibly fast and accurate with the Steam Controller. All it takes is the right settings and time.

And as for using the pads as joysticks ... ick.


Last edited by Nanobang on 8 February 2021 at 4:14 pm UTC

Regarding the patent kerfuffle:

I've given the whole copyright/patent topic more than a little thought over the last 40 or so years, and a whole lot of thought since the days of Napster. It annoys me no end when copyrights/patents are wielded to censure innovation rather than simply protect it. It just feels obviously, morally, wrong to me.

Personally, I've come to believe:

Copyrights and patents both acknowledge that the creator or creators of a specific design --- be it process, product, or piece of art --- have the right to profit from thir design and to protect that right. I call this creatorights or designrights.

To my thinking designrights belong solely, inalienably and inextricably to a creator because they do not exist without a creator. For this reason I believe designrights cannot be sold by --- or taken from --- their creator, though they can be licensed.

Lastly, any designright said to be "owned" by other than than the original creator can be seen as completely invalid and can be understood to be illegitimate. The laws defending such claims may be seen as wrong-headed (to my mind, anyway) as the ones upholding upholding separate-but-equal doctrines or the legal personhood of corporations.

Mine is clearly not a perfect system (and there's more to it, which has Corsair losing in some scenarios) but I think its better than the ones in place now.

With this in mind --- and assuming the design originated within Corsair --- I guess it comes down to how closely Steam's controller paddle design matches Corsair's. If it's the same in mechanics and function, I imagine Corsair deserved to win. Otherwise, I imagine they should have lost.

Frankly, just off the top of my head, its hard to imagine how Xbox Elite controller and Steam Controller's paddles have enough in common for Corsair to claim both of them could infringe. It is, however, easy to imagine, if a little cliché, some skullduggery where MS backs Corsair to go after Steam ...


Last edited by Nanobang on 4 February 2021 at 5:22 pm UTC

[quote=Arehandoro]

In chemistry and pharma aren't working either. The fact that a lab creates a vaccine and is not immediately available for every other lab to palliate with a disease, whether that is a solving erectile dysfunction or a pandemic, but rather they can prevent others from doing the same, or getting rich by leasing the patent, is utterly annoying. It could only come from the mind of a psychopath.

I have a problem following your reasoning here, development of a vaccine costs the pharmaceutical company billions. Giving them a time limited monopoly of said vaccine (aka the patent) is how we the society ensures that the pharmaceutical companies does invest these amounts. Talking about psychopathy here is just utter nonsense.

Corsair just lost points with me. I have bought from them before, but I do not think I will buy from them in the future. They will never notice , but I will feel better about myself.

In chemistry and pharma aren't working either. The fact that a lab creates a vaccine and is not immediately available for every other lab to palliate with a disease, whether that is a solving erectile dysfunction or a pandemic, but rather they can prevent others from doing the same, or getting rich by leasing the patent, is utterly annoying. It could only come from the mind of a psychopath.

I have a problem following your reasoning here, development of a vaccine costs the pharmaceutical company billions. Giving them a time limited monopoly of said vaccine (aka the patent) is how we the society ensures that the pharmaceutical companies does invest these amounts. Talking about psychopathy here is just utter nonsense.

That's a way we the society ensure that. It's not at all the only way. For instance, Moderna's development of a Covid vaccine was financed entirely up front by the US government--they didn't spend a dime of their own money and indeed made a profit before they'd ever started manufacturing. Then they were given a patent as well, but I don't see what the point of that was.

It's kind of an odd approach generally. I mean, most people who defend the patent system for pharmaceuticals concede that the big pharma companies don't really do a whole lot of original basic research--that's mainly public sector and pharma mostly piggybacks off the public sector ideas. What pharma does is lots of clinical trials, which cost a lot of money. OK, fine, for clinical trials to be done, money has to be spent, but what should that have to do with patents? It's a fairly mechanical process that doesn't involve coming up with original ideas, so why should our method of compensating it pretend that it does?

And as a method, it doesn't work terribly well. Vaccines don't typically make pharmaceutical companies a ton of money, so they don't spend that much money developing them. But vaccines are very useful in terms of public health. In fact, in terms of medicines, there is to some extent an inverse relationship between utility and profitability. Palliative treatments are more profitable than cures, since they can be sold again and again.
If you're a fan of "free markets" (which, OK, I'm not), patents are a massive distortion of those whether you're talking about the original Adam Smith et al. sense or the modern sense, since from Smith's perspective they create huge windfall economic rents and from the modern perspective they involve massive government intervention and from both perspectives they represent the literal creation of monopoly for the express purpose of distorting prices.
Those prices can get jacked up especially high because of the nature of medicine--how much will you pay the only person who can save your life? The highest profit will necessarily come at a price-point high enough that many won't be able to afford it. This is cruel and immoral. But there is also a substantial public interest issue. Bad public health has social and economic implications.
So between these issues, leaving it to the (patent-distorted) market to decide just which treatments and vaccines should be pursued is inevitably going to give you perverse outcomes where worse medicines are emphasized over better ones, and the medicines produced are undersupplied and overcharged for, leaving many untreated, and sucking unnecessarily huge amounts of money out of the broader economy, leaving pharmaceutical companies with huge windfall profits.

Those windfall profits are also a huge motivator to falsify the outcomes of clinical trials to make drugs look better and less risky than they are. This has caused tens of thousands of deaths. It would be better to just have companies that do clinical trials, have public agencies that decided which drugs should have trials done, and pay them to do them. The public agency's purpose would be to improve public health, not make a profit from perverse outcomes. So they wouldn't be motivated to avoid cures in favour of palliative treatments, nor to falsify results of clinical trials. Clinical trial companies would compete on price and accuracy. Then the drugs, once approved, could be handed over to generic drug makers who would manufacture them cheaply and, again, in competition rather than with a monopoly. And that's just one possibility. I'm sure there are plenty of other approaches that would be better than what we have for everything except letting big pharma siphon off windfall profits.


Last edited by Purple Library Guy on 4 February 2021 at 9:26 pm UTC

I still feel the exact opposite, even though I tried the Xbox one, PS4 and Nvidia Shield controllers. I always come back to my Steam Controller like old comfy slippers, even if I can admit that it's not perfect for all tasks, just like any controller, in fact.

Ah - so the Steam controller was your first controller? Then that may be the whole explanation right there. Habits are hard to get rid, so the first one get accustomed to usually sticks. :)

I mean, I really do DIG Valve's controller, love the looks, love the originality, love the build quality. But... Yeah. :(

I still feel the exact opposite, even though I tried the Xbox one, PS4 and Nvidia Shield controllers. I always come back to my Steam Controller like old comfy slippers, even if I can admit that it's not perfect for all tasks, just like any controller, in fact.

Ah - so the Steam controller was your first controller? Then that may be the whole explanation right there. Habits are hard to get rid, so the first one get accustomed to usually sticks. :)

I mean, I really do DIG Valve's controller, love the looks, love the originality, love the build quality. But... Yeah. :(

I don't think that's it (at least in my case).
I have two big boxes full of gamepads, Playstation ones, Xbox, Logitech...you name it. In time I used all of them at one point or another. I bought and used so many because I was never truly satisfied with them, like I was searching for something. And that thing turned out to be the Steam Controller, from the moment I got it in my hands I no longer had any use for the rest of them.

The only exception I make is for Stadia where I use a wired Logitech, and that is because I could never make Stadia play nice with SC.

I still feel the exact opposite, even though I tried the Xbox one, PS4 and Nvidia Shield controllers. I always come back to my Steam Controller like old comfy slippers, even if I can admit that it's not perfect for all tasks, just like any controller, in fact.

Ah - so the Steam controller was your first controller? Then that may be the whole explanation right there. Habits are hard to get rid, so the first one get accustomed to usually sticks. :)

I mean, I really do DIG Valve's controller, love the looks, love the originality, love the build quality. But... Yeah. :(

Not even that. Let me think... My first one is the Coleco Intellivision... Atari 2600... NES... SNES... N64... Sega Mastersystem... Sega Genesis... original Playstation & Xbox... Then I jumped to Twin sticks on PC with a couple of Logitechs after that (even the one that had a recoiling usb cable). Thing is, the right stick always felt ineffective and incomplete, to me. I never could get used to it. Sorry to debunk your theory...

Steam Controller FTW!

I bought and used so many because I was never truly satisfied with them, like I was searching for something. And that thing turned out to be the Steam Controller, from the moment I got it in my hands I no longer had any use for the rest of them.

This! Exactly this! I even dropped controllers altogether for a while in favor of K+M. The Steam Controller is the reason I gave them a new shot.

Imo, The only thing that's missing, in the Steam controller, is true Android TV support, outside of the Steam Link app (Nvidia Shield). The default configuration is K+M which is quite limited.


Last edited by Mohandevir on 5 February 2021 at 12:14 am UTC

... seems I should give my Steam controller another chance, then. Try to figure out how on EARTH you can find it to actually be better than two analogue sticks :)

I didn't write what you quoted as mine.

I have a problem following your reasoning here, development of a vaccine costs the pharmaceutical company billions. Giving them a time limited monopoly of said vaccine (aka the patent) is how we the society ensures that the pharmaceutical companies does invest these amounts. Talking about psychopathy here is just utter nonsense.

First off, we have a problem with pharmacy inflating these costs by a factor of 10, by including marketing and so on. And they've been doing this for decades.
https://www.thebodypro.com/article/r-d-really-cost -- 70 million instead of 700 in 2001. There are more of these papers out there, and they all get to the same conclusion, R&D costs get inflated by roughly a factor of 10. So it's not billions, but millions. See also the article I linked to.

Second, you can't just reproduce these things, even if they're (like the modeRNA vaccine) completely open. Usually competitors need around 3 years to catch up. And that's way enough time to recoup the R&D costs.

Finally, I don't see why I should constantly repeat arguments scientists have already made, and correct your mis-assumptions, just because you're too lazy to read the papers:
http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm (and read that chapter about pharmaceuticals here http://dklevine.com/papers/ip.ch.9.m1004.pdf)
https://www.researchoninnovation.org/dopatentswork/

... seems I should give my Steam controller another chance, then. Try to figure out how on EARTH you can find it to actually be better than two analogue sticks :)

It's a sure thing that there is a learning curve, but when you get the hang of it, you can do a lot more stuff then what's permitted by a stick. Your trackpad settings and mine will probably differ, too... That's the beauty of the Steam Controller: fully configurable. You will have to find one that's a good fit for you. For my part, joystick as mouse or mouse are the two best preset options, depending on the game and I tweak them to my liking. Joystick emulation is utter garbage, imo, but somebody might have found a use case for some niche game too.

Edit: And don't base your gyroscope experience on the one in the Dualshock4... Quite a bad implementation, imo... It's always on and it gets in the way most of the time. The default behavior of the one in the Steam controller is activated when you touch (no need to press) the right trackpad. So, if you don't need it, it gets out of the way.


Last edited by Mohandevir on 5 February 2021 at 1:16 pm UTC

... seems I should give my Steam controller another chance, then. Try to figure out how on EARTH you can find it to actually be better than two analogue sticks :)

It's a sure thing that there is a learning curve, but when you get the hang of it, you can do a lot more stuff then what's permitted by a stick. Your trackpad settings and mine will probably differ, too... That's the beauty of the Steam Controller: fully configurable. You will have to find one that's a good fit for you. For my part, joystick as mouse or mouse are the two best preset options, depending on the game and I tweak them to my liking. Joystick emulation is utter garbage, imo, but somebody might have found a use case for some niche game too.

Edit: And don't base your gyroscope experience on the one in the Dualshock4... Quite a bad implementation, imo... It's always on and it gets in the way most of the time. The default behavior of the one in the Steam controller is activated when you touch (no need to press) the right trackpad. So, if you don't need it, it gets out of the way.

I found the same thing with the Switch's (or Switch pro), the gyroscope was more irritating than useful. I haven't really tried it with the Steam Controller.

... seems I should give my Steam controller another chance, then. Try to figure out how on EARTH you can find it to actually be better than two analogue sticks :)

It's a sure thing that there is a learning curve, but when you get the hang of it, you can do a lot more stuff then what's permitted by a stick. Your trackpad settings and mine will probably differ, too... That's the beauty of the Steam Controller: fully configurable. You will have to find one that's a good fit for you. For my part, joystick as mouse or mouse are the two best preset options, depending on the game and I tweak them to my liking. Joystick emulation is utter garbage, imo, but somebody might have found a use case for some niche game too.

Edit: And don't base your gyroscope experience on the one in the Dualshock4... Quite a bad implementation, imo... It's always on and it gets in the way most of the time. The default behavior of the one in the Steam controller is activated when you touch (no need to press) the right trackpad. So, if you don't need it, it gets out of the way.

I found the same thing with the Switch's (or Switch pro), the gyroscope was more irritating than useful. I haven't really tried it with the Steam Controller.

Good to know... I couldn't speak for the Switch Pro controller (I don't have one). That's probably another advantage of the trackpad (touchpad)... I don't know how they could easily and naturally turn on and off the gyroscope with a stick... On the Steam controller, it's quite straightforward.

... seems I should give my Steam controller another chance, then. Try to figure out how on EARTH you can find it to actually be better than two analogue sticks :)

It's a sure thing that there is a learning curve, but when you get the hang of it, you can do a lot more stuff then what's permitted by a stick. Your trackpad settings and mine will probably differ, too... That's the beauty of the Steam Controller: fully configurable. You will have to find one that's a good fit for you. For my part, joystick as mouse or mouse are the two best preset options, depending on the game and I tweak them to my liking. Joystick emulation is utter garbage, imo, but somebody might have found a use case for some niche game too.

Edit: And don't base your gyroscope experience on the one in the Dualshock4... Quite a bad implementation, imo... It's always on and it gets in the way most of the time. The default behavior of the one in the Steam controller is activated when you touch (no need to press) the right trackpad. So, if you don't need it, it gets out of the way.

I found the same thing with the Switch's (or Switch pro), the gyroscope was more irritating than useful. I haven't really tried it with the Steam Controller.

Good to know... I couldn't speak for the Switch Pro controller (I don't have one). That's probably another advantage of the trackpad (touchpad)... I don't know how they could easily and naturally turn on and off the gyroscope with a stick... On the Steam controller, it's quite straightforward.

Yeah, I had to go into the settings of the game (in particular Breath of the Wild) to turn it off, as it's not really useful when you're laying in bed and you pull out your bow and shifting weird while laying down and you move all around and can't hit a damned thing :P

In chemistry and pharma aren't working either. The fact that a lab creates a vaccine and is not immediately available for every other lab to palliate with a disease, whether that is a solving erectile dysfunction or a pandemic, but rather they can prevent others from doing the same, or getting rich by leasing the patent, is utterly annoying. It could only come from the mind of a psychopath.

I have a problem following your reasoning here, development of a vaccine costs the pharmaceutical company billions. Giving them a time limited monopoly of said vaccine (aka the patent) is how we the society ensures that the pharmaceutical companies does invest these amounts. Talking about psychopathy here is just utter nonsense.

That's a way we the society ensure that. It's not at all the only way. For instance, Moderna's development of a Covid vaccine was financed entirely up front by the US government--they didn't spend a dime of their own money and indeed made a profit before they'd ever started manufacturing. Then they were given a patent as well, but I don't see what the point of that was.

It's kind of an odd approach generally. I mean, most people who defend the patent system for pharmaceuticals concede that the big pharma companies don't really do a whole lot of original basic research--that's mainly public sector and pharma mostly piggybacks off the public sector ideas. What pharma does is lots of clinical trials, which cost a lot of money. OK, fine, for clinical trials to be done, money has to be spent, but what should that have to do with patents? It's a fairly mechanical process that doesn't involve coming up with original ideas, so why should our method of compensating it pretend that it does?

And as a method, it doesn't work terribly well. Vaccines don't typically make pharmaceutical companies a ton of money, so they don't spend that much money developing them. But vaccines are very useful in terms of public health. In fact, in terms of medicines, there is to some extent an inverse relationship between utility and profitability. Palliative treatments are more profitable than cures, since they can be sold again and again.
If you're a fan of "free markets" (which, OK, I'm not), patents are a massive distortion of those whether you're talking about the original Adam Smith et al. sense or the modern sense, since from Smith's perspective they create huge windfall economic rents and from the modern perspective they involve massive government intervention and from both perspectives they represent the literal creation of monopoly for the express purpose of distorting prices.
Those prices can get jacked up especially high because of the nature of medicine--how much will you pay the only person who can save your life? The highest profit will necessarily come at a price-point high enough that many won't be able to afford it. This is cruel and immoral. But there is also a substantial public interest issue. Bad public health has social and economic implications.
So between these issues, leaving it to the (patent-distorted) market to decide just which treatments and vaccines should be pursued is inevitably going to give you perverse outcomes where worse medicines are emphasized over better ones, and the medicines produced are undersupplied and overcharged for, leaving many untreated, and sucking unnecessarily huge amounts of money out of the broader economy, leaving pharmaceutical companies with huge windfall profits.

Those windfall profits are also a huge motivator to falsify the outcomes of clinical trials to make drugs look better and less risky than they are. This has caused tens of thousands of deaths. It would be better to just have companies that do clinical trials, have public agencies that decided which drugs should have trials done, and pay them to do them. The public agency's purpose would be to improve public health, not make a profit from perverse outcomes. So they wouldn't be motivated to avoid cures in favour of palliative treatments, nor to falsify results of clinical trials. Clinical trial companies would compete on price and accuracy. Then the drugs, once approved, could be handed over to generic drug makers who would manufacture them cheaply and, again, in competition rather than with a monopoly. And that's just one possibility. I'm sure there are plenty of other approaches that would be better than what we have for everything except letting big pharma siphon off windfall profits.

I agree completely with you, I believe that pharmaceutical research should be funded by government and the results not patented.

I simply replied back to the argument that companies funding everything in private should immediately release their findings for free or be seen as psychopathic.

I didn't write what you quoted as mine.

I have a problem following your reasoning here, development of a vaccine costs the pharmaceutical company billions. Giving them a time limited monopoly of said vaccine (aka the patent) is how we the society ensures that the pharmaceutical companies does invest these amounts. Talking about psychopathy here is just utter nonsense.

First off, we have a problem with pharmacy inflating these costs by a factor of 10, by including marketing and so on. And they've been doing this for decades.
https://www.thebodypro.com/article/r-d-really-cost -- 70 million instead of 700 in 2001. There are more of these papers out there, and they all get to the same conclusion, R&D costs get inflated by roughly a factor of 10. So it's not billions, but millions. See also the article I linked to.

Second, you can't just reproduce these things, even if they're (like the modeRNA vaccine) completely open. Usually competitors need around 3 years to catch up. And that's way enough time to recoup the R&D costs.

Finally, I don't see why I should constantly repeat arguments scientists have already made, and correct your mis-assumptions, just because you're too lazy to read the papers:
http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm (and read that chapter about pharmaceuticals here http://dklevine.com/papers/ip.ch.9.m1004.pdf)
https://www.researchoninnovation.org/dopatentswork/

It seems like that I accidentally kept the wrong author when I trimmed the quote down for readability (aka the post that I did responded to contained a quote by you and I deleted the wrong author from the whole quote). Sorry about that!

The argument that I had was not for drugs but for vaccines in particular and $70M wouldn't even get you through the 3 trail phases. BARDA alone awarded Moderna $955M to speed up development of it's Covid-19 vaccine.

However, even if the full R&D cost plus all trials was only $70M then how is that an argument that they should just release it for free to all their competitors the same second they had developed it?

Please note that this is not an argument that patents are "the best thing ever", nor "the only solution" or that patents should be as long as 25 years and so forth. It was just an argument for why a company that have invested money in developing a vaccine could not just release it for free or be labelled as psychopathic. Nor is it an argument against letting drug companies in 3d world countries getting free access to such vaccines.