Networking & Multiplayer

Tencent received 1 patent covering a hybrid server-client architecture for large-scale multiplayer games. Rather than committing fully to either a client-synchronized or server-authoritative model, the system tracks each player's visible area and uses that information to decide in real time which game logic gets processed on the server versus the client. Entities outside a player's view are handled server-side, while visible elements remain client-side, reducing the synchronization overhead that typically limits how many players can share a game world simultaneously.

Nintendo received 3 patents, all centered on letting players share a game space without interfering with one another's experience. Two of them tackle this through ghost-like character representations: one renders competing players' characters as visually present but physically inert, meaning they can occupy the same space as the local player without creating obstacles or disruptions, with contextual information like player details appearing only when characters overlap. The other takes a similar approach for parallel competitive play, where opponents exist in their own separate virtual spaces and appear as ghost characters to one another, with visual effects shown on a ghost in the observing player's space but not affecting the originating player's actual session. The third patent addresses a different problem entirely, using a technique that temporarily slows a moving object's speed in the moments after a key game event to naturally absorb the timing differences caused by network latency, keeping the experience visually consistent across 3 or more connected players without relying on position snapping.

NetEase received 2 patents addressing localization and network performance for games. The first describes a proxy-based system that sits between game clients and servers, intercepting game data and automatically extracting and translating language resources on the fly, so games can be localized in real time without any modification to the client software or the underlying game infrastructure. The second uses a companion mobile phone as a dedicated network accelerator for a separate game host device, routing game traffic through the phone's connection to reduce latency without requiring the host device to run any acceleration software of its own.

Qualcomm received 1 patent focused on precise input timing across wirelessly connected game controllers. The system ties controller input timestamps to beacon signals broadcast by the gaming console, giving every connected device a shared time reference. This allows the console to accurately reconstruct the sequence of inputs from multiple controllers even when network transmission delays differ between them.

Niantic received 1 patent covering a low-latency anticheat processing architecture for AR and parallel-reality games. Traditional pipelines require all processing nodes to finish before results are combined, creating a bottleneck that slows down how quickly player data can be analyzed. This system allows each node to write its processed metrics to a rate-limited database as soon as it completes its portion of the work, independently of the other nodes, reducing end-to-end latency enough to process a full hour of player data within a 30-minute window.

Microsoft received 1 patent describing a way to bring local split-screen multiplayer to games that were designed to run only in online environments. The system runs multiple instances of the same game simultaneously, routes each player's inputs to their respective instance, and combines the resulting displays into a single split-screen output. This creates a local co-op experience without requiring game developers to have built native split-screen support into the game.

Hangzhou Electronic Soul Network Technology received 1 patent for a dynamic server management system designed for massively multiplayer online games. The system monitors player population across game scenes in real time and automatically merges servers when population drops below a useful threshold, then splits them again when a merged scene becomes too crowded. This goes beyond conventional load balancing by managing the full lifecycle of game scenes based on actual player density.

Magnopus received 1 patent for a cross-platform multiplayer infrastructure built to support XR environments at global scale. Unlike architectures that partition players by region or server through sharding, this system maintains seamless communication across servers worldwide using absolute-value messages that can recover from packet loss without requiring resynchronization. Server instances scale automatically based on user load, and players can move through virtual distances without experiencing reload periods or the connectivity gaps that regional boundaries typically introduce.