A newly published Sony patent suggests that massive textures and audio can be streamed while the “core” needed to run the game stays local, potentially enabling dramatically smaller installs.
AAA games have made huge leaps in visuals and scope in recent years, but their storage demands have increasingly become a real penalty: installs around 100GB are not uncommon, forcing constant deleting and reinstalling on both consoles and PC. According to Tech4Gamers, a newly identified Sony patent is aimed squarely at this problem, proposing a middle-ground model between full local installation and traditional cloud execution that could theoretically compress 100GB downloads down to something closer to a 100MB scale.
The core idea is that a small launcher and the critical core logic files required to run the game would be downloaded locally, while storage-heavy texture and audio assets would arrive via streaming from servers. The patent claims that the game would run locally, avoiding the usual latency package associated with cloud gaming: no noticeable input lag and no frame delays, because the technical files needed during gameplay would remain on the system.
“[The Executable] may be as part of a package comprising core assets […]. Such a package may be on the order of 100Mb, for example, rather than the order of 10Gb or 100Gb as may be more common for large-scale games.”
The document is titled Asset Streaming System and Method, and it also covers what happens under a weak connection. In this approach, latency is not necessarily the main problem; rather, streaming high-quality assets may be unstable, which at best leads to degraded visual quality. In that situation, the game can use pre-downloaded low-quality textures, or it can pre-stream enough data for a level/area to keep the experience smooth. Without internet, the game may still run, but with restrictions – for example, only with low-quality assets or other limitations.
Why This Approach Tries To Avoid Cloud Gaming’s Biggest Problem
“Cloud-based gaming can bring its own problems. For instance, a user’s internet connection may be limited (such as a mobile network connection) so as to cause a significant degree of latency to be experienced.”
In the patent’s logic, local execution is key because connection quality would not hit control responsiveness first, but would typically affect asset quality and availability instead. Tech4Gamers notes that Sony has previously obtained patents with similar end goals via different technical approaches, and this new document suggests the company is seriously looking for the best way to meaningfully reduce AAA game sizes.
Source: Tech4Gamers, WIPO Patentscope
