Sony’s Patent Allows Spectators To Remove Players In Games

Somehow, you can just feel unwanted trouble, knowing that Sony has a new patent granted for a voting system, allowing spectators to remove players from games. The patent is called Spectators and was filed in January 2020, being granted on Tuesday. 

What Could Go Wrong?: 

This feature clearly has advantages and disadvantages, which I feel some people already understand them. Have you ever felt like the last person to be chosen on a group project or high school sports team? That familiar feeling may return and perhaps feel profoundly worse. Spectators allows a number of viewers to have access to a menu, where they can vote to remove (or bench) players, after watching a game on a service like Twitch. A number of people can vote to send a gamer messages to play better or pay to have them removed. 

The scenario of people voting to have you removed can make you feel alienated, but if you just has your character playing against your own team, cheating, and/or using racial, violent, or abusive language, the idea of removing them works perfectly fine.

These features show that there are consequences for your actions, but can you imagine getting kicked out of a game for doing absolutely nothing wrong? If a total number of remove votes reach a certain threshold, the player will then be removed. It is sort of like a Skout app saying you violated the terms and conditions, but remain innocent.

Some people get banned from Twitch. Maybe their account was hacked on Twitter and Twitter refused to deactivate the account, after they spoke to the customer service. Here is a scenario you can attempt to imagine. There is a gamer you emotionally connect with, share more interests than just video games, you are both legal ages to date (but maybe you two respectively will not date), and right before you can get their contact information, you are banned. Maybe the spectators will choose the fourth option, keeping you in the game. Everyone obviously will not have the same experience and some people can fortunately afford to pay for gamers to be removed. 

Spectators will have access to another menu called Player Removal Options, where they can choose between ‘pay percentage of fixed price,’ ‘pay fixed price,’ or ‘bid in auction.’ What are your thoughts on this added feature?