Sony to stop making PS2's in US....
 

Sony has been told to pay $90.7m (£48m) in damages and stop selling PlayStation consoles in the United States after losing a patent infringement lawsuit.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/4387045.stm

ouch, Sony are appealing though

oucheee. Anyone with shares in sony - SELL NOW!!!!

Lol... just saw this on C4 news.

Seems the company was a bit arrogant with its position over the smaller comany, yet i am almost certain that you will be able to buy a PS2 in America again in the very near future.

A minor set-back... and a reminder to the larger companies out there not to piss on the smaller guys in business :wink:

So if they lose the appeal i guess they give that company a royalty fee for the tehnology hitting their profit margin slightly, this is just sensationalist journalism methinks, inconvienient for them yes, but isn't gonna change anything drastically IMO. Though i am glad the little(ish) company won for once....... so far :wink:

but... only sony has this unique technology of the vibrating pads? I've only played the gamecube and it has it?

so, why only this small IT went against sony?

Clearly a case of someone trying to make money from nothing.

Why go after Sony when the PS is 5 years out of production and the PS2 is about to be end-of-lifed?

Sony is a big easy target - that's all.

Umm, haven't controllers like that been around a lot longer than the PS2? I don't see why they would just sue Sony, what about Microsoft & Nintendo?

Uhmmm... because it's different in each pad. :roll:

Doesn't take a genius to realise that not all pads use the same mechanics. Just like you realise that DSC is different to ESP...

but basically the mechanic thingy is a tiny electric motor with a little metallic "uncentered" mass that rotates, unless things have changed in the last 5 yeas

That's not the issue.

All we know is that this company claimed to have some of their vibration design "stolen" by Sony. The "motor...uncentered mass" must be similar, but there will still be variation amongs designs. And some that aren't that different (read... Sony vs. Immersion Corporation) :wink:

This is pretty huge news. With the advent of Xbox 2 coming up, and the entire controversy surrounding its "premature" release, is now compounded by this huge sony issue. i wonder how the video game industry will change as a result..... interesting. and thanks for linking to the BBC webpage too.

^^^ what this means is probably that the stable cheap console world as we know it will be brought to it's knees and we will be stuck with 205 console makers all churing out their own junk and about 12 titles per console.

You know - just like what happened in the early 80's whne you had all those rubbish consoles... and the same with Apple - who cares about the "design" - we need it to be cheap, reliable and well supported.

Why won't the stupid Mac just die already.. :P

And not to mention that Linux junk... ;)

They did. Microsoft was smart enough to settle out of court and now owns a small part of the company I believe. Microsoft basically pays royalties to themselves. I'm not sure what Nintendo has done. They could have done the same as Microsoft, but Sony screwed themselves.

Last I heard, Sony got their appeal and can continue selling PS2's and whatnot.

Wait, are you talking about the rumble pak for the N64? cuz if so then i fail to see how it could have been a successful lawsuit since the rumble pak was a seperate module for the controller.

I dont' know, i was told Nintendo was sued as well, but I can't find much on it. If it uses the same method to rumble as the Dual shock and Xbox controllers, then they'll be sued just the same.

I'm sure it'll be straightened out. Sony is obviously not stupid. Why they fought it, who knows? Maybe they thought they could just crush them like they did with those emulator compnies. Just tie it up in courts untill the opposition runs out of money and drops the suit. With a $20million settlement from Microsoft, they ain't gonna be running out anytime soon.

I'm surprised no M$ haters haven't jumped on board to say this is Microsoft's doing yet. :roll: