A new patent from Sony Interactive Entertainment shows off a technology that would allow multiple players to share the inputs of a single controller using a cloud gaming service. Sony is leaning heavily into cloud gaming technologies at the moment.
The PlayStation 5 has been dominating the gaming world, and it doesn't seem as though Sony is content to rest on its laurels amid this success. Recently, Sony unveiled its new Project Q Remote Play handheld that has apparently been on the drawing board for the better part of eight years. Now, a newly published patent shows what could be another very promising technology for the PS5 or whatever else the company has coming in the future.
The title of the Sony patent is "Dynamic Allocation of Split Control in a Video Game," and a diagram along with a brief abstract explains further exactly what this patent could do for the gaming world. Essentially, this technology allows one controller's inputs to be divided between multiple players via a cloud gaming service. As the diagram shows, in a game like Street Fighter 6, there could potentially be one player controlling the sticks for movement, one player controlling the primary buttons, and one player controlling the trigger buttons. It is unclear at the moment if this feature would work outside of cloud gaming, as the patent only describes this as a cloud technology.
This patent is extremely interesting and could be a potentially groundbreaking accessibility feature for gamers with limitations on how many buttons they can reach on a controller. However, whether this will make controlling a character easier or more complicated is a good question. In a fighting game like Tekken or Street Fighter, which needs a high amount of coordination and memorization to pull off long combos and combo strings, sharing one controller could make this easier as a result of not having to memorize every movement of a combo. On the flip side, there would have to be a high level of communication between all involved players to ensure the buttons are hit in the right order.
If anything, this will be a supremely entertaining technology to watch and participate in. It seems likely that multiple people attempting to control one in-game character will result in a mess where no one can agree on what to do a lot of the time. This could make for some pretty hilarious moments if two or three big content creators got together to try and beat a difficult game like Elden Ring. It's going to be exciting to see how or if Sony ultimately unveils this tech.
