Nintendo has come out on top, winning a 15-year-old lawsuit against BigBen Interactive over a Wii controller patent. Back in June 2010, Nintendo filed a lawsuit in Germany against third-party accessory maker BigBen Interactive, now known as Nacon, alleging that certain Wii controllers sold by the company violated a European patent that covered key aspects of Nintendo’s Wii Remote tech. The patent included ergonomic design elements and sensor technologies that were inherent to the Wii controller ecosystem.
In its complaint, Nintendo argued that BigBen’s third-party Wiimotes used patented technology without permission, effectively siphoning profits from official Nintendo hardware. The defendant, BigBen, countered that if consumers hadn’t purchased its controllers, they would have just bought them from some other third-party company. This argument aimed to reduce Nintendo’s claimed damages by asserting that, even without BigBen, purchases wouldn’t have necessarily flowed back to Nintendo. Before the recent judgment, the case had already seen a few rulings. In July 2011, a decision found that BigBen was indeed guilty of infringement, and subsequent appeals over the years upheld these findings.
As the Palworld lawsuit continues, Nintendo secures another broad patent that one expert says poses a threat to the...
