PlayStation Goes Crypto? Sony Seeks Patent for ‘Super-Fungible’ Gaming Tokens
A just lately revealed patent utility from tech behemoth Sony, the maker of PlayStation, detailed the idea of “super-fungible tokens” for video games, which might be saved on a distributed ledger and transferable from participant to participant.
Many players have had experiences the place they get actually right into a online game, spend a bunch of cash on in-game skins or battle passes, and ultimately get uninterested in the sport. When this occurs in conventional “Web2” video games, gamers are compelled to just accept the cash spent on in-game belongings as a sunk price, and transfer on. You usually cannot promote these belongings.
However blockchain gaming modifications all of that, and the current patent utility—filed in 2022 however simply revealed to the general public final week—from Sony about super-fungible tokens hints that the tech big may need to get in on the shift.
The patent utility outlines a strategy of monitoring a set of gaming belongings related to a participant on an “digital gadget” and producing metadata primarily based on these belongings. The metadata would then be used to create a super-fungible token—primarily a bundle of assorted NFTs—the place the token is created by the storage of mentioned metadata on a distributed ledger that’s “related to the gaming utility.”
The appliance implies that Sony is contemplating permitting NFTs in its video games. Whereas the patent does embody the time period “distributed ledger,” aka a blockchain, it doesn’t specify whether or not or not it will be a personal or public ledger. Sony does specify that the distributed ledger in query could be “related to the gaming utility,” which means that Sony might plan to launch its personal chain for such an endeavor.
Both means, whether or not or not Sony launches NFTs on a public blockchain like Ethereum or Solana, or on a personal chain of its personal making, NFT adoption from such an enormous participant within the gaming business could be an enormous leap ahead for blockchain fanatics.
A diagram from Sony’s patent utility. Picture: Sony
In follow, super-fungible tokens are primarily a bundle of distinctive in-game belongings—akin to skins, weapons, autos, and so forth. which can be tokenized as NFTs—that can be utilized inside video video games. If Sony had been to pursue utilizing this patent, it will imply that one of many largest gaming firms on this planet is probably fascinated by permitting gamers to personal their very own in-game belongings.
“Probably,” as a result of on the finish of the day, it’s as much as Sony how a lot financialization it permits. If Sony chooses to pursue this framework on a personal chain that it controls, then the gaming big might impose all types of restrictions—however there’s no indication but that Sony really plans to roll out this performance any time quickly, if ever.
Decrypt‘s GG reached out to PlayStation for remark however didn’t instantly hear again.
This isn’t the primary time Sony has filed a patent associated to utilizing NFTs in PlayStation video games. Sony’s earlier patent utility targeted on giving gamers the power to personal and switch in-game belongings from one sport to a different.
Nevertheless, in the identical submitting, Sony claimed that the gaming consoles accessible right this moment are “technologically insufficient for the proprietor to make use of the asset throughout totally different video games and/or platforms.” That means that there’s nonetheless a while to go till we have now consoles which have the {hardware} essential to deal with an open NFT ecosystem.
Edited by Andrew Hayward
