ALEXANDRIA, Va., June 17 -- United States Patent no. 12,316,720, issued on May 27, was assigned to Games Global Operations Ltd. (Douglas, Isle of Man).

"Transaction processing system with decomposed architecture" was invented by Grant Michael Smith (Union Mills, Isle of Man), Scott Xavier Dukes (KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa) and Matthew John Harris (Berkhamsted, Great Britain).

According to the abstract* released by the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office: "An implementation may involve: receiving, by an application launcher, a message on behalf of a client device; determining a server application based on the message and metadata, wherein the server application is associated with a path, wherein the path includes a set of steps, wherein each o...