A patent suggests Sony has already done some work on NFTs and blockchain in the background.

Sony Interactive Entertainment filed its patent on May 7, 2021, published by WIPO on November 10 this year, just a few days ago. The patent title says a lot: “Tracking Unique In-Game Digital Assets Using Tokens on a Distributed Ledger,” and the abstract makes it sound like the company’s idea will be based on blockchain technology…

“The digital assets may be in-game digital assets, such as in-game items or characters. The digital assets may be video game digital media assets representing moments of gameplay of a video game, such as video clips or images. The digital asset is created, and a distributed ledger tracking the history of the digital asset is created and stored across devices. A unique token for the digital asset can include a unique identifier and metadata identifying properties of the digital asset,” the abstract says. It describes, roughly one-to-one, the creation of uniquely identified digital objects, or NFTs, on blockchain technology.

It’s worth repeating when Sony protected its patent. May 2021 was a different time. At that time, there was more of a craze around NFTs (which Ubisoft, for example, jumped on with its Quartz platform, but they haven’t pushed it since, while Square Enix, for example, started to push it harder this year), but since then, along with cryptocurrencies, NFTs have not gained much momentum. When PlayStation Stars, Sony’s loyalty program, was announced in July this year, and Sony had to explain that collectibles were not NFTs, you could already sense the change in mood.

Sony was also criticized when it asked about NFTs in a questionnaire at the EVO (the fighting game world championship, which it also owns). Given that Jim Ryan, the head of Sony Interactive Entertainment, is out of touch with reality and is just as much a bureaucratic number cruncher who doesn’t have the real needs of gamers in mind, don’t be surprised if Sony introduces NFTs in 2023…

Source: PSL