Gamevice, Inc. (formerly Wikipad, Inc.) is a

Simi Valley Simi Valley (; Chumash: ''Shimiyi'') is a city in the valley of the same name in the southeast region of Ventura County, California, United States. Simi Valley is from Downtown Los Angeles, making it part of the Greater Los Angeles Area. The ...

California California is a U.S. state, state in the Western United States, located along the West Coast of the United States, Pacific Coast. With nearly 39.2million residents across a total area of approximately , it is the List of states and territori ...

based tablet and tablet peripherals manufacturer specializing in

gaming Gaming may refer to: Games and sports The act of playing games, as in: * Legalized gambling, playing games of chance for money, often referred to in law as "gaming" * Playing a role-playing game, in which players assume fictional roles * Playin ...

products. The debut product was the Wikipad, a proprietary Android tablet hardware engineered for mobile

, which featured a detachable controller. Gamevice later came to market with a peripheral only product, rebranded under the name Gamevice. The company was founded by Matthew Joynes, James Bower, and Brendan Iribe. Appointing the current

CEO A chief executive officer (CEO), also known as a central executive officer (CEO), chief administrator officer (CAO) or just chief executive (CE), is one of a number of corporate executives charged with the management of an organization especially ...

Phillip Hyun.

History

Wikipad

At the

Consumer Electronics Show CES (; formerly an initialism for Consumer Electronics Show) is an annual trade show organized by the Consumer Technology Association (CTA). Held in January at the Las Vegas Convention Center in Winchester, Nevada, United States, the event typi ...

(CES) in

Las Vegas Las Vegas (; Spanish for "The Meadows"), often known simply as Vegas, is the 25th-most populous city in the United States, the most populous city in the state of Nevada, and the county seat of Clark County. The city anchors the Las Vegas ...

on January 10, 2012, the Wikipad was shown with both a 2D and a glasses-free 3D-enabled device. In May 2012,

Gaikai is an American company which provides technology for the streaming of high-end video games. Its technology has multiple applications, including in-home streaming over a local wired or wireless network (as in Remote Play between the PlayStation ...

, a

cloud gaming Cloud gaming, sometimes called gaming on demand or gaming-as-a-service or game streaming, is a type of online gaming that runs video games on remote servers and streams them directly to a user's device, or more colloquially, playing a game rem ...

service which

Sony , commonly stylized as SONY, is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Minato, Tokyo, Japan. As a major technology company, it operates as one of the world's largest manufacturers of consumer and professional ...

acquired two months later in July 2012, partnered with Wikipad, Inc. to integrate its streaming service into the tablet. The Wikipad was originally scheduled for an October 31, 2011 release, but was delayed indefinitely on the day it was originally supposed to be released. The Wikipad was released on June 11, 2013 in the United States with a price tag of $249. In March 2014, a game control mapping tool was announced for the Wikipad to help map touchscreen game controls to the physical Wikipad controller in an effort to improve gameplay. Also in March, the price of the Wikipad dropped to $199. In June 2014,

OnLive OnLive was a Mountain View, California-based provider of cloud virtualization technologies. OnLive's flagship product was its cloud gaming service, which allowed subscribers to rent or demo computer games without installing them on their device. ...

cloud gaming support was added to the Wikipad.

Reception

Eurogamer ''Eurogamer'' is a British video game journalism website launched in 1999 and owned by alongside formed company Gamer Network. Its editor-in-chief is Martin Robinson. Since 2008, it is known for the formerly eponymous games trade fair EGX ...

rated the Wikipad's screen size and intentions as nice, saying it had "its heart in the right place", but decided that the lack of compelling Android games, high launch price, and outdated specs and software limited the appeal of the device.

IGN ''IGN'' (formerly ''Imagine Games Network'') is an American video game and entertainment media website operated by IGN Entertainment Inc., a subsidiary of Ziff Davis, Inc. The company's headquarters is located in San Francisco's SoMa distri ...

gave the Wikipad poor reviews taking into consideration the lack of games in its library, flimsy construction, and software that was considered dated, even at the time of the device's release. It concludes that "The Wikipad is a mostly failed attempt at turning an Android tablet into a gaming handheld." An aggregation of reviews done by

Engadget ''Engadget'' ( ) is a multilingual technology blog network with daily coverage of gadgets and consumer electronics. ''Engadget'' manages ten blogs four of which are written in English and six have international versions with independent editori ...

shows the average review score of the Wikipad among critics to be 58/100.

Gamevice

In January 2014, Wikipad, Inc. announced a new controller called Gamevice to expand its mobile device coverage. The industrial design for the Gamevice controller was developed by

RKS Design RKS Design is a California design firm and innovation consultancy founded in 1980 by industrial designers, Ravi Sawhney. The company designs and develops consumer, medical, and industrial products, as well as user interfaces, and user experiences ...

. Gamevice is a detachable controller with a classic

D-pad A D-pad (short for directional pad or digital pad; officially referred to by Nintendo as a +Control Pad) is a flat, usually thumb-operated, often digital, four-way directional control with one button on each point, found on nearly all modern vid ...

; twin triggers; A, B, X, and Y buttons; and dual

analog stick An analog stick (or analogue stick in British English), sometimes called a control stick or thumbstick, is an input device for a controller (often a game controller) that is used for two-dimensional input. An analog stick is a variation of a joy ...

s. On January 31, 2017, a new Gamevice controller was released for the

iPhone 7 The iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus are smartphones that were designed, developed, and marketed by Apple Inc. They are the tenth generation of the iPhone. They were announced on September 7, 2016, at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Fr ...

. On February 15, 2018, Gamevice announced and launched a

Minecraft ''Minecraft'' is a sandbox game developed by Mojang Studios. The game was created by Markus "Notch" Persson in the Java programming language. Following several early private testing versions, it was first made public in May 2009 before being ...

-themed controller bundle, which includes a Gamevice controller, a carrying case for the controller and a download code for Minecraft on

iOS iOS (formerly iPhone OS) is a mobile operating system created and developed by Apple Inc. exclusively for its hardware. It is the operating system that powers many of the company's mobile devices, including the iPhone; the term also includes ...

Legal

In August 2017, Gamevice filed a lawsuit against Nintendo in the

United States District Court for the Central District of California The United States District Court for the Central District of California (in case citations, C.D. Cal.; commonly referred to as the CDCA or CACD) is a Federal trial court that serves over 19 million people in Southern and Central California, m ...

, alleging that the design of the

Nintendo Switch The is a hybrid video game console developed by Nintendo and released worldwide in most regions on March 3, 2017. The console itself is a Tablet computer#Gaming tablet, tablet that can either be docking station, docked for use as a home video ...

conflicts with its patent on the design for the

Wikipad Gamevice, Inc. (formerly Wikipad, Inc.) is a Simi Valley, California based tablet and tablet peripherals manufacturer specializing in gaming products. The debut product was the Wikipad, a proprietary Android tablet hardware engineered for mob ...

. The lawsuit sought damages on existing Switch sales and banning further sales of the console. The lawsuit was voluntarily dismissed by Gamevice in October 2017. However, in March 2018, Gamevice initiated a second patent infringement lawsuit on Nintendo related to a different set of patents. Gamevice also sought action through the

United States International Trade Commission The United States International Trade Commission (USITC or I.T.C.) is an agency of the United States federal government that advises the legislative and executive branches on matters of trade. It is an independent, bipartisan entity that analyze ...

related to patent infringement under Section 337 of the

Tariff Act of 1930 A tariff is a tax imposed by the government of a country or by a supranational union on imports or exports of goods. Besides being a source of revenue for the government, import duties can also be a form of regulation of foreign trade and polic ...

, and was seeking to block imports of the Switch into the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

. On October 10, 2019, the lawsuit against Nintendo has ended, alleging the U.S. International Trade Commission has determined to affirm the conclusion of the presiding administrative law judge's initial determination that no violation of Section 337 has occurred. On March 27, 2020, Gamevice filed a new patent-infringement lawsuit at the USITC against Nintendo in addition to appealing the previous case that it lost. It ended in favour of Nintendo.NOTICE OF COMMISSION DETERMINATION NOT TO REVIEW AN INITIAL DETERMINATION TERMINATING THE INVESTIGATION WITH RESPECT TO A PATENT CLAIM
/ref>

References

{{Reflist , 30em Tablet computers Android (operating system) devices