One of the big new features to come to consoles allow people to easily share clips and screenshots from the games that they play. A new Sony patent shows that the company is looking to improve the player experience of sharing game content on PlayStation platforms.
On the PlayStation 5, there's a dedicated create button on the controller. When players press it, their gameplay pauses, allowing them to either take a screenshot, start recording their gameplay, record gameplay that already happened, or even start editing the content they have recorded. The shared content can then be published on the PlayStation network for players to share content, like their favorite Ghost of Tsushima screenshots, with other players.
Sony's newly published patent looks to improve this process by better filtering what clips and parts of clips players will see available when browsing on the PlayStation Network or even having a clip sent to them. To do so, the patent looks at using a program that identifies what is going on in the clip and assigning it an ESRB rating once the clip is processed. This allows players to set preferences for clip ratings on their profile. If they only want to see clips up to rated T, they will only get clips up to that rating, so that they don't accidentally get clips of Kratos brutalizing enemies in the new God of War.
However, if players do want to see God of War clips but don't want to view clips higher than an E10 or T rating, the patent also has a solution for catering to those players. To do so, the patent theorizes a system that tags the content in a clip with certain identifiers, such as sexual content, gore, or language. After using those tags to generate the clip's rating it also generates lower-rated versions of the clip with those sections removed so that players can still view the clips of higher-rated titles like Days Gone without seeing any content they don't wish to. This also allows players to filter out specific tags that they don't want to see, which could also help players filter out story spoilers while watching clips of newer titles.
Many patents never lead to any meaningful software or hardware development, but it does seem likely that Sony will move forward with this one. Creating a community for players to interact and share content with one another seems important for the future of PlayStation, and the patent theorizes a way to make it more accessible for all players. With the numerous other Sony patents that have recently been published, hopefully, fans will start seeing some of them making their way to consoles soon.