FarmVille creator Zynga sued by Walker Digital over gaming patent

Well, what do you know, it's almost noon. Time for another Zynga lawsuit, isn't it? Walker Digital has sued Zynga and Activision Blizzard for patent infringement, claiming the three companies made use of U.S. patent no. 6, 425,828, which belongs to Walker Digital, according to TechCrunch. Issued on July 30, 2002, the patent is titled, "Database driven online distributed tournament system." More specifically, Walker Digital's 20-page patent boils down to:

    A method and a system for a distributed electronic tournament system in which many remotely located players participate in a tournament through input/output devices connected to a central controller which manages the tournament. The method includes the steps of (a) uniquely identifying a player communicating with the central controller via an associated input/output device...


While there are three more steps to how the patent operates involving prize winnings and database management, what's most interesting is the first. Because of how widely terms like that could interpreted, games like Mafia Wars, World of Warcraft and the Call of Duty series are claimed by Walker Digital to infringe on the patent, Tech Crunch reports.

With the amount of times the company has faced legal disputes in 2010, it is almost unsurprising that the social gaming juggernaut didn't even make it through the first month of 2011 without a lawsuit being presented to them. Oh, the joys of running multi-billion dollar companies. We've contacted Zynga for comment, so stay tuned.

Call of Duty veterans set crosshairs for 'first-person social game'

Call of Duty
That sounds a helluva lot like "first-person shooter game," no? Well, these folks are best known for their contributions to hardcore games like Call of Duty. VentureBeat reports that Activision veterans Dusty Welch and Chris Archer have founded their own social game studio, U4iA. Pronounced "euphoria" (that's cute), the Bellevue, Wash.-based studio aims to bring core games to Facebook in a big way.

Welch (CEO) and Archer (CCO) aim to set the quality bar even higher on Facebook and mobile with a "first-person social game" that matches the caliber of recent free-to-play games like League of Legends, according to VentureBeat. At least from what the U4iA heads see, the future of social games is the arrival of traditional gamers.

"We're making core games for a social audience." Welch told VentureBeat, "We think the hardcore gamers are going to start looking for the core games on the social and mobile networks now." Well, with companies like Kixeye and Kabam gunning for the same audience, at least they're not alone.

"We think we're at the spearhead of a lot of cool things," Welch said to VentureBeat. Since the guy is credited with creating the Call of Duty series--the best-selling game franchise ever--we can't really contest that. This first-person shooter social game will be created for both Facebook and mobile devices using the Unity Player. With expertise like that, we're sure the game will be a technological marvel, but will the audience be there to bear witness?