"Today in Oakland, California, Sony lost a patent infringement court battle with Immersion Corp pertaining to Sony's use of Dual Shock and Dual Shock 2 controllers in its PlayStation and PlayStation 2 consoles. Sony has been ordered to pay Immersion $90.7 million in damages and is also expected to stop selling the patent infringing PlayStation and PlayStation 2 systems, as well as over forty games that infringe on Immersion's patent.

The case revolves around US patents 6,275,213 and 6,424,333 which cover "haptic feedback," which entails the use of computer-controlled vibrating motors to provide tactile feedback to the user of a program.

Following the ruling, Sony was granted a temporary stay of injunction while the case pends appeal, that will subsequently allow Sony to sell the offending consoles and games until the appeal is resolved.

Should the appeal go against Sony, the company may be forced to discontinue sales and production of its PlayStation brand hardware and software, as well as a portion of it's gaming library, including two major Square-Enix titles, Final Fantasy X and Kingdom Hearts. Sony is also being forced to discontinue the production of any number of games until the appeal is heard. The identities of those games was unavailable at current time.

A full list of affected games can be found by following the link below Link >> Games Affected By Today's Ruling

Of the affected games, Immersion Corp could be looking into the possibilites of a large sum of royalties in additon to what was granted in this hearing. Sony Computer Entertainment, and Sony as a whole, could be looking at a much tougher Financial Forecast than they originally thought.

With Sony still in ownership of 19% of Square-Enix, it is of particular interest to see what, if any, trouble the company will encounter because of this ruling.

In related news, In early 2002, Immersion filed suit against both Sony and Microsoft for patent infringement, that resulted in Microsoft settling out of court in mid-2003 for the sum of $26 million to license the technology and buying a portion of Immersion in the process."

Article Quoted From RPGamer.com