The crux of the story, though, concerns patents 6,219,045 and 7,181,690. In (something like) English, those refer to “scalable virtual world client-server chat system” and “system and method for enabling users to interact in a virtual space”. There’s space for a lot of give and take in those descriptions, but you get the point - two fundaments of pretty much every MMO past, present, and probably future.

On Christmas Eve (Christmas Eve. Man!) one Worlds.com, which currently creates, as well as its own long-running Second Lifey app, 3D virtual worlds for various clients (most recently legendary hip-hop fella DMC and Aerosmith, amusingly) flexed its patent-muscle in the direction of MMO publisher/developer NCsoft. It first filed the terrible twosome in 1996 and 2001 respectively. In other words - it does rather look as though they’ve potentially got the MMO industry by the short and curlies. In theory, Worlds can go after everyone. God only knows what they could squeeze out of Blizzard.

Would anyone notice if we replaced EvaUnit02 with a Rock Paper Shotgun RSS?