Today in What Could Possibly Go Wrong: Sony has patented a new feature for the PlayStation that would allow players to simply tap their credit card on the controller to make purchases.
The patent was published last week under the title “Video game controller-driven information transfer,” and involves “techniques [that] pertain to improving video game system performance.”
The improvements in question involve making it easier to spend money. As with all patent documentation, the actual filing is kinda difficult to read, full of boilerplate disclaimers, claimers, and everything in between, and this one seems particularly… well, half-baked, to be honest. There are spelling and grammatical mistakes throughout, the subheadings are crammed up into the preceding paragraphs, and the whole thing gives the impression of having been thrown together in as little time as possible.
Amusingly, the framing is entirely in terms of Sony kindly acceding to the demands and desires of players: “Video game players have found it desirable to store payment method information and account information such as credit account information, bank account information, gift card information, digital wallet identification information, crypto wallet identification information, and associated credentials in their accounts for facilitating and managing video game purchases, video game credits, in-app purchases, and the like.”
Sony, of course, has absolutely no stake in making it as easy as possible to splash out on video game purchases, in-app purchases, and the like. Nope. It’s just doing what its players want! (This is probably news to anyone who would rather like to own physical copies of their games.)
Traditionally, the application tells us, carrying out tasks like logging into a user account, setting preferences, and managing payment details has required multiple steps, any of which can cause “performance of the video game console to suffer and or one or more operations of the video game console to fail.” The document is particularly preoccupied with the necessity to use multiple input devices for these purposes, presenting multiple scenarios where a user might need to, say, use the controller to select an option and then their phone to scan a QR code to confirm that choice.
This seems more like pisspoor UI design than anything else, but the document is adamant that the way around them is to let the controller take on the functionality that currently requires a phone or other input device. It describes the various ways in which this could work in exhaustive, mind-numbing detail, but the point is that the controller could incorporate “one or more processors and one or more computer-readable media storing instructions” that would let it act as a sort of hybrid card/RFID reader. Woohoo.
Anyway, the usual disclaimers about this being a patent document apply: there’s no telling whether this feature will ever make it to a real-life controller, etc. But still, imagine a world where you can just tap your phone or credit card on your controller and pay for yet another microtransaction! Well, OK, sure, that would actually be pretty convenient, yes. Just don’t let North West near it.
