Late last year, Sony Interactive Entertainment filed a patent that would allow viewers to get more involved with livestreams by voting to remove players from games.
Kotaku now reports that the United States Patent and Trademark office has approved this patent which, among other things, will allow us to remove “substandard” players - and even allow spectators to pay to boot others from games.
SIE filed the application with the USPTO back in January 2020, but it wasn’t made public until last July. The patent explains a number of "game-playing attributes" that might lead to a player getting booted. These include "bad behavior, poor sportsmanship, and substandard performance". A player that’s been kicked can also be substituted for another.
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Bizarrely, the system kind of sounds like it’ll work a lot like Among Us. While spectators can vote to remove a player, that player will stay in the game if the decision isn't approved by the majority. Being charged to vote still sounds super weird though, and I can see this getting abused in too many ways.
"In one embodiment, the interface to enable providing of feedback to the cloud gaming system enables a spectator to pay in full a fixed price to have a player removed from playing the video game, and the removal of the player is performed by the cloud gaming system when payment in full of the fixed price is received from the spectator," the patent reads.
"In another embodiment, the interface to enable providing of feedback to the cloud gaming system enables a plurality of spectators to pay a part of a fixed price to have a player removed from playing the video game, and the removal of the player is performed by the cloud gaming system when combined payment in full of the fixed price is received from the plurality of spectators each of whom paid a part of the fixed price to have the player removed from playing the video game."
As always, it's important to remember that patents are very rarely indicative of a final product, and is more often than not nothing more than a company making a claim to an idea it might want to use down the line. Let’s just hope this one undergoes a few more tweaks if it ever sees the light of day.
Featured Image Credit: SonyTopics: PlayStation