Supercell Loses Lawsuit Over Alleged Patent Misuse, Must Pay $92 Million

Notable mobile developer Supercell has been ordered to pay the Japanese company Gree more than $92 million due to a legal dispute. As reported by Bloomberg, a federal jury in Texas found that Supercell's games infringed on six of Gree's patents in the US.

Supercell is best-known for developing extremely popular freemium mobile games such as Clash of Clans, Clash Royale, and Hay Day. Gree's suit claimed that Supercell's highly profitable games infringed on its patents, which involve networking functionality, the frequency of item drops, and the way user information is stored, among other aspects.

Gree's lawyer told jurors that Supercell made $3 billion from the three listed games in the US alone during the time of infringement. In response, Supercell claimed that the patents were invalid, as well as denying the use of any patented technology in the first place. Because the jury ruled that the infringement was willful, the judge could increase the award up to three times.

Supercell is currently owned by Chinese gaming giant Tencent, who bought an 84% share of the company for $8.6 billion in 2016. Other notable gaming lawsuits of the year so far include an antitrust suit filed against Valve by a game developer that accuses the company of holding a monopoly in the PC games market. Sony faces a similar class-action lawsuit that claims that the company has a monopoly on PlayStation games because third-party retailers no longer sell download codes for PlayStation games. Developer CD Projekt Red also faces a class-action lawsuit from its own investors that claims that the developer misled people about the game's performance on last-gen consoles.