Nintendo OLED Lawsuit Filed By OLED Company Solas

A Nintendo OLED lawsuit has been filed by an Irish company called Solas due to Samsung using OLED components without its permission.

Nintendo might be in trouble with the new Switch OLED version that was released several weeks ago. An Irish company by the name of Solas that specializes in OLED technologies has filed a lawsuit against the company for allegedly violating its patents with the existence of the OLED Nintendo Switch console.

Solas is a company that was founded in 2016 and specializes in OLED technology licensing. Their patent portfolio covers a wide range of OLED structures, architecture, display design, and circuitry, at least four of which are apparently being violated by the existence of this new Switch variant.

The Nintendo Switch OLED is an upgraded version of the Nintendo Switch, supposedly capable of better graphics, resolution, and framerate than the normal Nintendo Switch console. It also has a larger screen and better audio, along with an improved kickstand attachment.

Apparently, the issue lies not within Nintendo itself, however, but with the company that supplies the OLED screen for the Nintendo Switch, Samsung Display Co. Ltd., identified in the lawsuit as SDC. Solas’s issue is that SDC has not received permission to distribute OLED screens from Solas despite Solas owning the patent.

Before the Nintendo OLED lawsuit was filed, Solas filed and won another lawsuit against SDC back in March, winning $80 million dollars from SDC for infringing on Solas’s patents. However, that doesn’t seem to have made Samsung any more careful to ask for permission before distributing OLED technology to other companies.

Who knows how Nintendo will fare in this, especially since it seems like Samsung is more the target of the lawsuit than Nintendo is, but it may create some kind of issue with the Nintendo Switch OLED version further on. This new variant of the Nintendo Switch released October 2, but with the Nintendo OLED lawsuit, they may be forced to stop shipping the console variants until a new arrangement is made.

Then again, Nintendo themselves has also said that if you’re not a fan of the OLED screen, to stick with your normal Switch, as other than the better display, the two consoles are entirely identical.

Hunter is senior news writer at SegmentNext.com. He is a long time fan of strategy, RPG, and tabletop games. When he is not playing games, he likes to write about them.