nVidia Claims Patent On Interactive Gaming Servers

joeblake writes: "nVidia apparently thinks that because they have control of the computer graphics market, they can control the world. nVidia has filed a patent stating their ownership of 'Interactive Gaming Servers and Online Community Forum'. How nVidia goes from graphics cards to gaming servers beats me."

Mirror

[Account 10]

Alternative location for the patent [delphion.com]. Uspto is notoriously slow.

And to clarify the story ... it was just issued. nVidia filed it 18 months ago.

How?

[Account 10]

How nVidia goes from graphics cards to gaming servers beats me.

It's quite simple really ... have the idea first. No more than that.

Looking at the patent...

[jmd!]

Looking at the patent, it seems they've patented a CGI ranking system. Bravo! What an invention. Who could have concieved of such a system except some brilliant mind at nVidia.

Oh, and battle.net.

And 10 year old Internet chess servers.

Prior Art?

[VValdo]

I don't know if this has any relevency (I haven't really looked at the patent) but a ton of online games used to rank users back in the day on Bulletin Boards on the Apple ][ and match them against each other. These include role playing games as well as simple online video games. (I myself wrote a few online text-based video games that ranked users in like 1985)

There was also a bulletin board system called Proving Grounds that was basically a multiplayer adventure game played online that matched you up with people of your own skill level to do battle. Not with a web server, but the idea was the same.

As I recall, numerous MUDs would have entry levels for new users to get their skill levels up to the point they could go where all the regular users were.

If any networked game says something like "is this your first time here?" and then puts you in a different game with other users as users with preset accounts, wouldn't that be prior art for this patent?

W

I think it's been touched on before...

[OneFix]

But it bears repeating. Many companies simply patent any ideas that their employees come up with. They don't care if it's valid or even falls into their specific realm, they simply file for a patent...

Most patents will be accepted (valid or not)...many patents will not be tested, some will be...When these "idiot patents" are brought against their targets, there are often hidden agendas...

It is really only for investors...you can say "We've had over 500 patents accepted this year"...it makes investors happy, because it at least looks like they are getting a huge return on their investment...

Darn straight.

[King of the World]

It's about time you damn hippies learnt who made interactive gaming servers!

S.W.A.G.

[Picass0]

There are two reasons I can think of that Nvidia would do this:

1. They are greedy cocksuckers. Pardon my French.
2. It's a pre-emptive strike. Nvidia sees all of they whacked-out patents being issued on technologies that impact the PC market, and they are working to secure technologies that impact them directly or indirectly. They may not want to rape other companies for money. They just don't want to be raped.
3. They really are just greedy cocksuckers.

Re:S.W.A.G.

[Wiwi Jumbo]

"They are greedy cocksuckers. Pardon my French."

Ya know... I really don't think that's French...

Re:S.W.A.G.

[LordNimon]

It's a pre-emptive strike. Nvidia sees all of they whacked-out patents being issued on technologies that impact the PC market, and they are working to secure technologies that impact them directly or indirectly. They may not want to rape other companies for money. They just don't want to be raped.

A lot of companies claim this, but it's illogical. All you need to do is publish a description your technology in some print journal, and it becomes prior art for anyone trying to patent it.

Re:S.W.A.G.

[J. Random Software]

If someone comes after you for infringing their blatantly invalid patent,
it's allegedly easier to fend them off and stay out of court
if you also have some blatantly invalid patents they could hardly avoid infringing.
Sometimes you just swap licenses to each other's portfolios,
which has the added effect of preventing new competitors from entering the market.

Re:S.W.A.G.

[J. Random Software]

Your patent doesn't make you immune from other patents on similar inventions. The tactic I was referring to is holding some overbroad patent, so that if anyone is going to sue you for infringing theirs, you can threaten to sue them for infringing yours--usually the result then is to swap licenses (relatively little money changes hands).

Re:S.W.A.G.

[baxissimo]

What journal is going to accept a paper on an "CGI ranking system for online games"? Come on, even the lamest journals would surely laugh at such a thing. Only the US Patent office is silly enough to think such a pile of old ideas is "innovative".

But still, your point is valid. If all they want is to make sure no one else can claim it they just have to make it public. Web pages count as public disclosures too, so no journal pub is necessary.

But even an altruistic company has incentive to patent everything under the sun. As someone mentioned they look good in reports to investors, and also they serve as leverage when you get sued. Recall not too long ago when there were law suits flaring up between SGI and NVIDIA, and in the end they were able to resolve things amicably in part by patent swap agreements. That probably wouldn't have gone so well for NVIDIA if all they had to swap with was ideas they gave to the public domain.

Clarification

[Rampant Atrocity]

Let me clarify what Nvidia is actually patenting, as the Slashdot headline and blurb are misleading.

Nvidia acknowledges that they didn't invent Gaming Servers. The patent reads:

In recent years multiplayer, online video games have become popular...See, for example, U.S. Pat. No. 5,841,980, entitled "Distributed System for Communication Networks in Multiuser Applications"; U.S. Pat. No. 5,823,879, entitled "Network Gaming System"; and U.S. Pat. No. 5,838,909, entitled "Reducing Latency When Synchronizing Access to a Multiuser Database over a Network.

Nvidia sees the following problem in prior art multiplayer gaming servers:

A problem arises in that the players often have differing skill levels and game attribute preferences. For example, one player may want to play "Quake" only against other players having a skill level at least equal to his or her own skill level.

So, their invention is an Interactive gaming server that basically "..runs at least one game having multiple levels of play and playable by a plurality of users simultaneously." (visit the site for more detail).

I still think the patent is utter crap, but it's certainly not as bad as the Slashdot headline made it out to be.

Re:Clarification

[tricorn]

I don't understand all the "wherein"s in this patent. Are those conjunctions or unions? It's all in one claim, so I'd think that to infringe on the patent you'd have to have every single element listed in all the wherein clauses. Yet, the last two are directly contradictory:

wherein the network server and the game server are physically proximate to each other and directly connected together;

wherein the network server and the game server are geographically remote from each other and the network server interfaces with the game server via the network.

If you'd have to have every single element listed in that claim to infringe on it, this is the most ridiculously specific patent I've ever seen. Regardless of the merits with regard to innovation or creativity, or the existence of relevant prior art, I'm not sure this thing could be infringed if you tried.

If, instead, all those wherein clauses are independent, shouldn't they have each been separate claims?

The fourth-to-last wherein also seems to have a typo, I think it is missing the word "include", thus:

wherein the preferences

include a level of skill of other game players simultaneously playing a game as reflected by their game player statistics;

It's not actually that bad.

[WasterDave]

If you look at it, what they're actually claiming a patent on is collecting people's scores and putting them on the WWW.

Now, admittedly if this all goes ahead it's going to piss a lot of people off. Customers, for instance. I'm sure Anandtech et al would have a thing or two to say about it as well. But it's no show stopper. It's not like they're suing John Carmack for writing network games or anything.

And besides, he was the prior art in this case - the patent was filed end of August '99.

Dave

Re:It's not actually that bad.

[Grahf666]

If you look at it, what they're actually claiming a patent on is collecting people's scores and putting them on the WWW.

Well, that's kinda been done too, with Unreal Tournament's ngWorldStats system, and other's I'd imagine.

Why you should never buy a nVidia Card

[fluor2]

I remember when 3dfx was the ruler of the 3D-World. They were nice.

How nVidia made lives hard for 3dfx owners
After nVidia bought 3DFX, they stopped all driver-development on Voodoo-cards, and in the end making it very hard for users who wanted to run Windows XP drivers. Microsoft would not sign the opengl and glide drivers because they found some errors in the drivers. There were rumours that Microsoft even tried to make nVidia give them the drivers, so Microsoft could fix them for free.

But nVidia claimed they were not the copyright owners of the drivers, and they also did not want any Windows XP drivers on the market. This would of course push every voodoo owner to buy a new graphic card.

This was one of the worst cases of business I've ever seen. There were a lot of protests from various petitions on-line, but nVidia never wanted to respond.

I would surely NEVER buy a nVidia card, and you should not do so either. Go for ATI Radeon instead (which are even better than nVidia).

Re:Why you should never buy a nVidia Card

[Vodak]

Slashdot readers don't care about what you have to say on this matter, unless you can somehow link Microsoft using it's monopoly power to make NVidia buy 3DfX they see it as perfectly fine that Nvidia bought it's only real rival.

=]

(Ati is fine with the Radeon I even own three cards myself but they don't care about the gamers market)

Re:Why you should never buy a nVidia Card

[Artana Niveus Corvum]

It's funny that you bother bringing this up. From what I remember nvidia was a really big nobody and 3dfx was the only real power in the 3D gaming market for YEARS. When 3dfx began to fail in keeping up with the times (think banshee, voodoo3 era)... they got run over. Simple as that.
Also, when nvidia "bought 3DFX", they didn't buy the whole thing... only key assets... certain things that they wanted. Nvidia has said from the VERY BEGINNING that they did not take responsibility for supporting 3dfx's product lines. Anyone who expected them too anyway was either not listening or just plain dense. It simply wouldn't have made sense for them to do so.

So do whatever you like, buy ATI, buy Nvidia, buy 3DLabs, whatever... just get your facts at least relatively in order before you whine about them. (and it might be a good idea to check benchmark data before claiming one card is better than another)

(didn't /. run an article about this or something a few days ago? you'd think someone might have bothered to read, but oh well)

This is already been done

[DragonPup]

Mythic Entertainment [darkageofcamelot.com] already has the servers post 'scoring' info onto a web server, the Herald [camelotherald.com] lists players scores(called Realm Points) and updates automagically, as well as the entire realm status.

-Henry

Another crap patent

[studerby]

Based on the patent abstract, this looks like another crap patent.

Patented inventions are required to be, well, "inventive", and this looks to be a straightforward distributed app., the only "novelty" being that it's using the web for gaming. In other words, they're describing an implementation of standard technology applied to a standard problem.

I think it fails the non-obviousness test, especially in light of the state of the art on the filing date...

A classic example of the "on a computer" syndrome of crap patents...

Some MORE Clarification

[Nos.]

Some previous commenters have clarified the subject of the article, but I'm going a bit farther. Read the article and have a look at the key points.

The things they mention aren't exactly revolutionary, but they are a nice idea. I'm going to use Half-Life (DoD mod) as an example, as that's the game I'm most familiar with. In essence, I as a player, would go to nVidia's website (or whoever hosts it). I'd say that I'm looking for a server running the DoD mod. I want no snipers, normal gravity, and >30 min maps.

Because my unique WonID is registered in their database, it would also match up servers that have players of near equal skill ratings.

As I said, not incredibly revolutionary, but something I would love to see. Imagine playing your favourite game and being able to look for servers that match your preferences (something most games will let you do now), but also by the skill of the other players in that server. Now, instead of being new to a game and joining a "newbie" server that has mid-skill players that seem like experts, you actually be able to see the average skill level of players in a server and compare that to your own.

Personally I think its a great idea and look forward to seeing this become part of all my favourite online-multiplayer-games.

Re:Some MORE Clarification

[Nos.]

Depends on how the skill calculations are done. On my DoD server, I run a program called FastStats (see http://faststats.sourceforge.net). In any case, your skill is based not solely on your kill ratio, but on the skill of your victimes (and anyone that kills you). So, if you're killing people with no skill, your skill isn't going to change (or change very little). However, if you're being routinely killed by somebody with low skill, your skill is going to drop rapidly while their skill rises quickly.

Back to your scenario, lets say that everybody on your 5:1 server has about the same skill level (skill matters, not K:D ratios). If at the end of a few hours of gaming, everyone is sitting at about 1:1, then chances are, nobody's skill really changed that much.

However, the read advantage comes in when you go onto one of these servers and do really well. Your skill level is going to climb. Whereas you go into a server with people half your skill level, your going to find your skill level not changing or possibly even dropping!

Gamespy?

[jsimon12]

Seems almost to be a patent of Gamespy? Did nVidia buy them?