Sony seems to work for many months on a system to protect players against famous spoilers of the games they are waiting anxiously !
© Sony Interactive Entertainment
A few days ago, the highly anticipated The Last Of Us Part II has been the victim of very heavy leaks on different forums with strangers, disclosing the entirety of his script and a few clips of gameplay. A disaster for the studio Naughty Dog, which is entering its last days of development (the game was pushed back to June 19, 2020 due to the crisis of the Covid-19).
Alas, the next title from Naughty Dog is not the only one to be hit by this scourge. While here, see the game leaker even before its release is a case apart, a good number of players is spoiler a few days before the release of a game, or the days that follow, because of small malignant who come to view pictures or video clips on the forums and social networks. And if Sony had been working on this since… 2018 ?
A patent anti-spoil put online recently
© appft1.uspto.gov
It is, therefore, based on the famous official website of the american administration that Sony has filed a patent in October 2018, which was published a few days ago only. A patent without images, but with many explanations, which show that Sony has been working for nearly two years on a system to block sequences of games that can spoil the plot of the game in question. For several years already, Sony is trying to protect players with a list of trophies partially hidden prior to the release of the game. With this new patent, the japanese giant could take it a step further.
The idea is to allow a platform for the identification of many items and objects that are likely to be spoilers and block them so that no screenshot or video capture would be possible. The idea is not to blur the image, but to literally block the sequence. Thus, this would prevent players to share passages on social networks. As shown in the patent, the items or objects in question, which could be blocked are quite varied :
A trophy, the user-generated content, an activity, a character, an entity, a parameter, a revelation, an action, a purpose, a place, a video, a post community, a level, a subject, statistics.
A problem arises already at this (good) idea. What is the streameurs on Twitch, YouTube, or even Mix ? With this kind of initiatives, these players might as well be blocked and could therefore not offer the game in live broadcast. Sony does it go to the end with this patent ? The firm said it found an alternative solution ? Case to follow !
