The new patents from Electronic Arts are still coming as the industry giant continues to develop new software to better emulate and engage with players. However, while another recent patent was looking to replicate human behavior through AI, this newest one seems to be more interested with learning about specific players through machine learning.
Originally filed with the US Patent Office in October 2020, the documentation is now available to be viewed by the public and might give some developers under the Electronic Arts umbrella an early idea of how to integrate the new software. This will be especially useful for games that have dynamic ways of playing music, as the recent patent is looking to learn the kind of music that players are listening to.
According to the patent's descriptions, it acts as a piece of tracking software that will be able to tell what type of music that a user with the program installed is listening to. The intention is to be able to determine the style of music that a user prefers based on their previous listening history and playback a similar type of songs while a game is playing. This could especially be useful for EA's ongoing titles like Apex Legends, where players would often be listening to music that plays in the background during longer play sessions.
The way that the program is designed to work according to the information presented in the patent, it will be reaching out to third party music apps in order to find "at least, music playlists to which a user created or is subscribed" as EA claims. So, how much information the program is able to take in will often depend on how willing music apps like Spotify and YouTube Music will be willing to communicate user data. Considering how much background tracking is done with many of these programs in order to better build custom mixes for their users, it's likely that much of the data the patent is looking for has already been collected.
Tracking software is always a murky area on the internet, with the safety of private data becoming the selling point of countless online security programs and VPNs. So, if EA is planning on putting trackers into either its games or the EA Play subscription service, then this might cause safety concerns with some players and their preferred methods of security. It's unlikely that this kind of program will lead to anything harmful, but the perception is still a gray area that will require EA to upfront about the program once implemented.
Source: Espacenet