Sony Patents To Let Players Buy “Shares” In Game-Related NFTs

Each player involved in the same digital asset could hold a share of it.

By Shahmeer Sarfaraz May 12, 2023

Story Highlights

Sony has recently patented a new NFT-related document that discusses letting many players buy “shares” of digital assets, including the ones involved in its creation.
The patent discusses dividing NFTs into multiple purchasable assets into shares, making their purchase easier in games due to the reduced costs.
Each share could hold intrinsic value, along with a popularity factor, and it could be shown as a unique image near the profile of players in games.
The shares can be exchangeable among the community; it can be traded, sold, purchased, given as rewards, and more.

Sony is the leading giant in the upcoming age of NFTs in the video games industry, and it has published yet another enticing and controversial patent that seeks to meld blockchain technology into games. As per the new legal document, players can possibly buy “shares” in an NFT, solving the issue of inaccessibility due to potentially high prices and making it easier to grab shares of a digital asset if you cannot outright buy a whole piece.

The patent dubbed “FRACTIONAL NON-FUNGIBLE TOKEN FOR GAME RELATED DIGITAL ASSETS” explores the notion of dividing NFTs into multiple purchasable assets that can be owned by many players. For instance, if recorded gaming footage has been trapped in the abyss of blockchain to ensure it can’t be stolen, then every involved player in that clip could buy shares of that NFT to own a piece of it.

The figure shows a user making an NFT and the system dividing it into shares.

The private block chain can utilize a private ledger that enables tracking of the minting of NFT’s, and associated shares for each NFT. In this manner, and NFT is not a single NFT, but shares of one original NFT. The shares defined the fractionalization of the NFT, and assigned those fractional shares to specific users,” mentions Sony.

As stated by Sony, each share of an NFT owned by a player can withhold appropriate intrinsic values to make it valuable. For instance, each user boasting a share could display a unique image alongside the in-game profile while playing a multiplayer entry or if the followers or spectators are watching the user play. The image could work like a trophy in the game world.

The share is exchangeable among a community of users of the online gaming system. The method further includes tracking use of each of the set of shares of the NFT and applying a value indicator to each share by the online gaming system. The value indicator is indicative of a level of use of the share within the online gaming system.”

Figure four shows an example implementation of NFT shares in games. Figure five reveals how spectators can select shares.

As said explicitly in the patent, the users can possibly be those who were a part of the content when it was created. For instance, they can be “players in a game or spectators in a game, or can be assigned to third-party users that were not part of the content in the digital media.” According to one detailed embodiment, the number of shares could be limited to the number of users participating in its creation.

Moreover, each share owned by multiple users could be sold, traded, and the like, which could naturally boost or reduce the worth of a digital asset. The patent states multiple ways for trading, including in-game options, social media, and more. Sony also discusses adding a popularity score and other statistics for each unique share of an NFT, resulting in users knowing how much it has been traded, the number of likes received, and the sort.

The in-game shares of an NFT can also be rewarded to spectators of a live stream or the fan base of a content creator. The number of trades or demand could significantly boost the price of the share of an NFT, as noted earlier. According to the patent, NFTs could become an integral part of games by becoming a significant resource to create competition in the community.

This is not the first time Sony has published a polemic legal document related to NFTs, with it recently publicizing a patent to predict the value of your NFTs using the power of AI. Moreover, it reportedly wants to implement a system to let players temporarily rent digital assets until the allotted time to own or use them expires.

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