Consider it a rite of passage: Valve has finally become successful enough at building gaming hardware that it’s getting sued by Immersion Corporation.

Immersion — the haptic feedback company that’s purchased, developed, or otherwise accumulated so many patents on rumble tech that almost every major tech company has licensed or settled out of court — is now accusing Valve of infringing its patents with the Steam Deck handheld, the Valve Index VR platform, its SteamVR software, and Half-Life: Alyx among other titles. There’s no mention of Valve’s long-gone Steam Controller, which also used lots of haptic feedback.

Immersion is asking for damages, royalties, and an injunction against Valve “from deploying, operating, maintaining, testing,...

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