Sony Interactive Entertainment has patented its own eSports betting system, according to some recently discovered documents from 2019. At the time of writing, Sony has not implemented its system (nor announced any plans to) but by holding the patent the company is hanging on to the possibility.

This patent is just the latest Sony foray to come to light; a few weeks back it was revealed that Sony patented an AI to mimic player behavior. The video game company has been incredibly proactive in the last few months, with various ambitious deals and patents commandeering the news cycle, and now it appears that it is happening again.

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It was recently reported by Patent Scope (courtesy of VGC) that Sony filed patents for its own proprietary eSports betting platform. According to the patent, the platform would use prior data of professional players and/or teams to determine the odds of one or more bets, and then present those bets to players. The patent says that these bets, "can include straightforward bets on one side or the other winning the simulation; total and individual point scores; over-under bets," or can be a wide array of more specific bets, "such as whether a character will be 'killed' in the next X minutes."

Sony's platform would accept/payout various forms of currency, such as money or bitcoin, but could also include game assets, digital rights, and virtual currency. The full patent includes much more information that shows how deep Sony's propositions can get, giving bettors a slew of propositions to place bets on, which would add to the rapidly rising trend of eSports betting.

Since the patents were originally granted (back in 2019), a report has since been published, claiming that eSports betting was causing a gambling epidemic among young people, yet the practice remains widespread across various competitive gaming competitions. In fact, gambling in and around video games has been increasingly lucrative — to the ire of players.

For instance, back in April, it was revealed that EA was incentivizing FIFA players to buy more loot boxes, at the expense of the game's other modes. That story was just one such example, but in reality, the practice is present in other franchises as well. Various governments around the world have at least announced investigations into loot boxes and video game gambling as a whole, while other countries like Belgium have flat-out banned loot boxes and other forms of gambling in games. Perhaps this growing pushback is why Sony has not yet utilized its eSports betting platform, but who is to say that this will be the case forever.

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Sources: Patent ScopeVGC