Sony Patents What If Technology

Ryan Easby

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As a species, we’re utterly obsessed with the idea of what could have been. Now it looks like gaming, or more specifically the PlayStation, will show us how our gameplay segments could have gone differently.

The What If Patent

The patent reads as following:

“Methods and systems are provided for generating an outcome of a previous gameplay. The method includes providing access of a recording of the previous gameplay, the recording is one that was shared by a player for the previous gameplay. The method includes providing an interface that identifies one or more what-if scenarios for the previous gameplay. The one or more what-if scenarios being selected for inclusion into the interface is based on processing the recording of the previous gameplay through a machine learning model to identify what-if scenarios for the user, and options for what-if scenarios are provided to the interface. The method includes enabling the selection of at least one of the what-if scenarios from the options. The selection causes an adjustment to metadata associated with the recording of the previous gameplay. The method includes replaying the recording that was selected using the adjusted metadata to generate the alternative outcome of the previous gameplay.“

What Does This Imply?

So this is seemingly implying that you’ll soon be able to find out how else you might have taken out that enemy in the corner of your screen, or how you might have done a quicker lap on a racing game. It’s a technology with extremely interesting applications that could be massively overreaching for the industry at large, but it’s not the only patent that Sony has filed recently. They’ve also filed various patents to emulate the use of PS3-era peripherals on the PS5, suggesting actual emulation could be on the way, as opposed to the streaming currently available via PS Plus for PS3 games.