Activision Patents Pay-To-Win Matchmaker (rollingstone.com)

New submitter EndlessNameless writes: If you like fair play, you might not like future Activision games. They will cross the line to encourage microtransactions, specifically matching players to both encourage and reward purchase. Rewarding the purchase, in particular, is an explicit and egregious elimination of any claim to fair play. "For example, if the player purchased a particular weapon, the microtransaction engine may match the player in a gameplay session in which the particular weapon is highly effective, giving the player an impression that the particular weapon was a good purchase," according to the patent. "This may encourage the player to make future purchases to achieve similar gameplay results." Even though the patent's examples are all for a first-person-shooter game, the system could be used across a wide variety of titles. "This was an exploratory patent filed in 2015 by an R&D team working independently from our game studios," an Activision spokesperson tells Rolling Stone. "It has not been implemented in-game." Bungie also confirmed that the technology isn't being used in games currently on the market, mentioning specifically Destiny 2.

Comments

Cheating

[sehlat]

It is said that when there are cheaters in a game, nobody wins. When the PROVIDER is cheating, that goes double. But as Cory Doctorow has pointed out, if you can't check the source code, how do you know for certain?

So they target big-ego small-skill players?

[gweihir]

I.e. the Dunning-Kruger sufferers of players, that are pretty bad by do not know that. Well, I predict they will make great business with that model, but quite a few players will find themselves disgusted and repulsed by these games. I certainly will very carefully check before I ever buy anything from the again.

Incidentally, why can you patent such stuff? this is both trivial and highly immoral. Both should make this completely non-patentable.