Sony has been on a roll with filing patents for both the PlayStation 5 and the company’s offerings in general.
While some of these filings are relatively minor additions to the PlayStation experience, others could have a much more substantial impact.
An example of a minor patent involves reading a player’s real-life facial expressions via a camera located in the controller and then converting the expression into an emoji that could be sent to other people.
Another Sony patent has been filed, which could bring an AR assistant to the newest Virtual Reality platform being developed for the PS5.
Several of Sony’s patents also involve esports, and it seems that the company is now interested in doing more than simply being the hardware enabler for these events.
On July 8th, Sony submitted a continuation for a patent they had filed back in 2018. Titled “Online Tournament Integration,” it would make it easier for players, developers, and third-party organizers to quickly set up a gaming tournament.
This could be a small-scale tournament amongst friends or a large-scale official esports competition.
This supplement to the filing comes less than a month before the Evolution Championship Series, referred to as EVO, which Sony acquired in March of this year.
While it is unlikely anything may come from this patent in time for EVO, the timing of the patent filing is intriguing.
The framework proposed for the online tournament integration system is a “gaming network platform” where players would need to register an account for esports events.
Several games can be integrated into the platform, from 1v1 titles, team-based games to practically any game which gives people “the ability to compete against other players” and “lends itself to tournament-style play.”
In this proposed system, one player would be assigned the role of organizer of the tournament. They would be able to send out invitations to other players to join.
The system would also include tools for team management, event tracking, detailing tournament parameters, social tools, instant messaging, and browsing live and archived streams of esports events.
The interactivity would extend to the spectators too, as they would follow players and be notified of the other events, including those players.
According to the patent filings, game tournaments are the most successful when the players’ skills are at a similar level. The online tournament integration system would allow the organizers to set specific qualifications which must be met to participate.
This could be achieved by having practice rounds that track the player’s metrics or evaluating their wins vs. losses, the total amount of time spent playing a game, the number of kills or points accrued, etc.
It would be interesting to see a Sony-developed platform specifically for tournaments. If this is opened up for the public and is either free or priced perfectly, it could become as big as Twitch.
About Sony
Sony Corporation is a Japanese multinational conglomerate corporation headquartered in Kōnan, Minato, Tokyo. The company operates as one of the most comprehensive media companies on the planet and also holds the distinctions of being the largest video game console company and the second largest video game publisher in the world.
Its gaming and network services arm Sony Interactive Entertainment (formerly Sony Computer Entertainment) is best known for producing the popular line of PlayStation consoles.
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