Sony has patented a new multiplayer matchmaking system that aims to bundle players together into virtual "houses," "neighborhoods," and "villages," depending on their capabilities in a given video game. While multiplayer gaming is one of the most important and notable aspects of the modern video game industry, the available matchmaking implementations haven't veered too far from one another up until now.

Given just how invested Sony is in the gaming industry at large, it's not particularly strange or surprising to see that it would attempt to come up with an exciting new way of matching players of a similar skill level together, and the newly proposed Cross Skill Competition patent has a few interesting ideas as to how this might work. Whether it pans out is a wholly different matter, naturally.

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As neat as Sony's recent voice communication patent may be, the company's "Cross Skill Competition" patent could have some seriously far-reaching consequences over a long period of time. Namely, the listing explains that the system's proposed competition server would keep track of players' skill profiles and then, in some cases, send them invites to specific "houses." These houses would connect players of an equal skill level, with multiple houses forming "neighborhoods" and, at a large enough scale, even "villages." In multiplayer games, the server would pair together players of similar skill levels using their houses as a reference of how proficient they are, even going so far as to have them compete together in large-scale tournaments.

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Whether Sony is on the right track with its Cross Skill Competition patent won't be clear until the system gets implemented in an actual video game, but many modern matchmaking solutions have been criticized by the games' respective communities for how obtuse and problematic they are. The most recent example of this is none other than Modern Warfare 2's skill-based matchmaking, which is a big enough issue that tight-knit player groups are dissolving over it.

Should it ever come to fruition, Cross Skill Competition could potentially end up getting used for one of Bungie's multiple unannounced video games, as Sony acquired the developer specifically for its live-service production expertise, as shown with Destiny 2. If the system of skill-based player houses does take off, it could have the potential to revolutionize the multiplayer matchmaking scene, but only time will tell how that might pan out.

With games already allegedly targeting a PlayStation 6 tier of hardware, it's entirely possible that Sony isn't looking to bring Cross Skill Competition to fruition before the dawn of a new console generation. The project is bound to be complicated and involved, and there's no telling what stage of production — if it's even being actively developed at this time — it might currently be in.

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