Platforms & Ecosystems

Sony received 3 patents covering cross-platform infrastructure and player experience. The universal invite system generates shareable URLs that route players to their native platform client, letting someone on PlayStation 5 invite an Xbox or PC friend into a game session without either party needing to be friends on a shared platform. A second patent describes a recommendation engine that blends user preferences with randomness, surfacing unplayed games that match a player's tastes while still introducing titles outside their usual comfort zone. The third patent creates a digital passport that carries PlayStation 5 account settings like privacy controls, content filters, and parental restrictions into third-party apps and services automatically, flagging any setting a third-party cannot honor and optionally using blockchain to create a tamper-resistant audit trail for changes to passport data.

EA received 1 patent for a social party system that exists independently of any single game's team-size or party limits. Players can form groups larger than a game's maximum team size and stay connected across different titles and modes, communicating and coordinating without being forced to split or dissolve their social grouping when a game imposes smaller constraints.

GN Store Nord received 1 patent for a gameplay capture mechanism that maintains a rolling buffer in fast storage and only commits a defined window to permanent storage when a monitored action fires. The approach preserves moments immediately before a trigger event without requiring continuous archival of an entire play session, capturing footage a player cannot manually clip in time.

Microsoft received 1 patent for tracking when players receive help completing achievements. The system sandboxes assistance sessions from a saved state, then conditionally merges the outcome back with metadata that distinguishes assisted wins from unassisted ones, preserving competitive integrity by visually flagging which achievements were earned independently and which involved outside help.

Truist Bank received 1 patent for a random number generation system that uses a player's current point balance as an input parameter sent to an external RNG server. The approach ties the random number generated to the player's account state rather than generating it purely from system variables, combining this with device-identifier-based geolocation to create a chain of custody for sweepstakes-style outcomes in computer games.

VRChat received 1 patent for a platform-side pipeline that processes user-created game objects before distribution. The system deduplicates assets, validates executable code against a whitelist of pre-recognized safe segments, and automatically modifies assets for platform compatibility when the underlying platform updates, removing the need for creators to manually resubmit content and reducing the risk and cost of running user-generated content at scale.

Activision Blizzard received 1 patent for a content delivery network designed for internal game development teams. The system uses content-addressed chunking to break builds into smaller pieces, maintains a two-tier hierarchy of local studio cache nodes and centralized object storage, and transfers only genuinely new data chunks rather than entire files when syncing massive game builds across worldwide studios. A label-based referencing system with expiry attributes automates lifecycle management and garbage collection across all nodes, and the patent extends the approach to console development kits by streaming from local cache nodes during execution.