Sony's PlayStation is a big name in the gaming industry, but it keeps striving to bring new things to players to stay strong. Recently, Sony Interactive Entertainment did something interesting by filing a patent. It looks like the company wants to have multiplayer gaming events in movie theaters to give players a unique experience.
Spotted by OPAttack, It seems like SIE is looking for a technique to scale multiplayer co-op as well as competitive gaming “to dozens or even scores of people playing simultaneously.” Their plan is to do this through movie theatres, by projecting the gameplay on the massive screen and having every person in the theatre have a controller in their hand and also access to one “character or avatar” in the gameplay space available on the screen. Through this technique, if there are over 100 people in the audience, then they could be controlling over 100 avatars on the screen.
Furthermore, the patent also recognises the limitations of local multiplayer gameplay, stating that this kind of gaming is usually only possible between two and four players sitting in the room and the experience has been built for “a limited number of people playing on a single console, usually in a home.” The patent also talks about the opportunities of building such games in augmented reality, which will bring new challenges such as “rendering many slightly different points of view of the same game.”
In terms of implementation, the patent states that at least one server will communicate with all the controllers in the theatre “over a wide area computer network” and will also be configured to provide audio and video representation of the controller inputs to at least one display. This surely sounds like an interesting idea, but a chaotic one too, as having 100 players playing the same game at one time would be another challenge they need to figure out. However, this is a step forward towards local co-op gaming, which is a nice thing as that is a concept that is slowly disappearing.
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BonWeech on August 25th, 2023 at 12:45 UTC »
Let me know when they can make my dreams multiplayer