Hah, you beat me to it Rox. I was literally about to post that link! You're on the ball tonight.
Basically that patent covers anything even remotely MMO. It's ridiculous. It's got a weird history to it too. It was created by some charity ages ago, or something, and was owned by LucasArts maybe at one point.
As people realised just how much it could cover, it got sold on, but it had reached the point where a lot of people thought they'd never win the suits.
Obviously Microsoft paid up, but it's a pretty dark cloud for gaming in general.
They were going for NCSoft, I seem to recall, but the case is still open. Last I heard, they were trying to claim 'prior art', which is to say that the idea of the patent pre-existed the patent itself, in a publicly available form.
If they win against anyone though, then every developer out there is gonna have to cough up the cash.
