Sony's gaming patents are now starting to coalesce into exciting new features for PlayStation consoles, and today's new addition could help pave the way for major next-gen upgrades on the PlayStation 6.
Community Game Help is now live on PS5, turning PlayStation users into tipsters along the way. The new feature is an evolution of the PS5's Game Help feature that gives users video and/or picture tutorials on how to complete certain activities in a game (e.g. boss fights). Think of it as a digital version of those old NES secrets books from the 1990s.
What does the Community Game Help feature actually do? How does it work? Sony explains: "Once you turn on the settings, your PS5 will automatically capture a video when you complete a certain activity in a game. Then, it will be reviewed by a moderator, and if approved, your video will be published as a Game Help hint for PlayStation players to watch, learn from, and rate."
I remember reading about this feature when scanning Sony patents, especially when checking the innovative Game Slice / Game Jump patents that I previously reported on.
So...how does this tie into the PlayStation 6?
The fact that Community Game Help has actually made its way into the PS5 shows that some of these patents could actually make their way into the PS5, PS5 Pro, or even the PS6. Sony appears to be trying to create a unique social infrastructure where users can share tips and tricks, as well as actual game saves/state saves, to other users.
This new help feature is related to the Game Slice / Game Jump patents we previously covered, albeit in a more static way. Essentially, the Community Game Help is a non-interactive version of these patents.
That brings us to another related patent: real-time predictive assistance.
This new assistance tech would leverage AI in order to operate, which could facilitate the need for an NPU (Neural Processing Unit), a separate AI chip designed to handle specific types of computation and take the workload off the unified CPU and GPU in the process.
Since the PS5 Pro isn't expected to have an NPU chip, I speculated that the predictive assistance tech would show up in the PlayStation 6, if at all.
Eventually, things like game saves and captures could be commoditized in some sort of store platform. These things could very well count as a kind of User-Generated Content (UGC) of sorts that offer gamers unique opportunities to monetize their time and/or creations, or, at the very least, help their fellow community members tackle bosses and tough missions.
Check below for more info on Sony PlayStation's gaming patents: