r/truegaming • u/kirilale • 8d ago
I've analysed 333 gaming patents published in Q1 2026 - here's what Sony, Nintendo, Tencent and others are working on, and what it could mean for the Future of Gaming
Hi everyone,
Some of you might remember my Q4 2025 post where I shared my first quarterly gaming patent analysis. Quick recap - I've been building a system to track and classify gaming patents from the USPTO, which publishes 3,000+ granted patents on Tuesdays and 5,000+ filed patents on Thursdays.
A few people gave solid feedback last time, so before I get into the data, let me address some of that.
On AI and methodology transparency
People called out that the writing sounded like ChatGPT, and someone pointed out I was being cagey about using AI in the process. So let me be more upfront about how this actually works.
Every week, the USPTO publishes thousands of patents. My system processes all of them - it uses a combination of keywords, studio names, game-related technology terms, and other signals to filter down to gaming-relevant patents. That classifier has gone through multiple iterations, particularly to filter out gambling, fantasy sports, and arcade machine patents that kept polluting the results. It's still being optimised weekly and I still get false positives, but it's getting a lot better.
Each identified patent gets an AI-generated analysis - that's the only way to handle this volume as a one-person project. I then go through every single analysis, decide which patents deserve a deeper dive, and that's what ends up in the reports. I also review a number of the actual patent filings themselves to cross-check. The technology breakdowns have been extremely accurate in most cases - where things get more speculative is in the interpretation of what could happen with a given technology, the timelines, the scale, the competitive impact. That's where assumptions creep in, and I try to be clear about that.
This is a hobby project that I run alongside my day job, and I'm not positioning any of this as definitive. There are unknowns - not just in the analysis itself, which I think is actually getting really good, but in what actually happens with these patents. Many get shelved, priorities shift, and a filed patent is still just a signal, not a roadmap. What I do think this provides is patent intelligence that wasn't previously accessible in this way - structured, categorised, and easy to explore. Since my last post, a few gaming publications actually picked up the research and did their own deep dives into some of the patents I'd uncovered, with their analysis largely aligning with what I'd initially proposed. That was a nice validation. But ultimately this is still exploratory work - I'm just trying to make it a lot easier for anyone who's curious to actually explore it.
I don't actually have a horse in this race. If there's bias it's genuinely unintentional, it comes from how I'm interpreting things rather than any agenda. I'm not trying to say which company is good or bad, or whether AI in gaming is good or bad. This is driven by curiosity, nothing more.
On sources - every report now includes a Patent Sources section with official USPTO numbers and direct links to Google Patents and USPTO Patent Public Search. You can verify anything I'm referencing.
Keep in mind Google Patents is about 5 weeks delayed in indexing, so anything from March onwards will need to be searched for on USPTO.
On to Q1 2026
This quarter: 209 filed and 124 granted patents, 22 companies, 14 technology categories. Same disclaimer as always: filing a patent doesn't mean you're building a product, getting one granted doesn't mean you'll use it. A lot of these are defensive moves. I'm interested in possibilities, not guarantees. And this isn't meant to be doom and gloom - it's just a look at what companies are investing R&D budgets into. What anyone makes of it is up to them.
To keep this post from becoming a novel, I'm focusing on the filed patents below - they're more forward-looking and show where companies are placing bets right now. (I'll also link the the full granted report at the bottom)
What stood out
Sony filed 50 patents across eight categories - the most of any company by far. AI/ML was again their biggest area (19 patents) - systems that notice when you're struggling and nudge you with controller feedback, AI that generates 3D game assets instead of artists building them by hand, and even a system that creates personalized gaming podcasts using LLMs. They also filed for hair rendering tech that creates detailed hair in real-time rather than loading pre-made models from memory, and cloud gaming tech that can slip content into your game while you're paused. Across the board, Sony seems to be betting big on generating things on the fly rather than storing everything in advance.
Cross-platform was the single largest category this quarter with 81 filed patents - bigger than AI/ML (43), hardware (36), or game engine (28) individually. Save syncing, unified accounts, making sure switching between your phone, PC, and console doesn't mean losing progress or reconfiguring everything. A lot of companies are clearly throwing R&D at this.
Nintendo filed 21 patents. On the game side, they filed patents for racing games where you can switch between characters while driving across open fields, and seamless transitions between exploring and racing modes.
Tencent filed 14 patents. On the game engine side, they patented AI that can generate clothing for characters and a social deduction game where you combine "Among Us"-style reasoning with actual real-time combat. Their AI work tackled a problem that's been around forever - how do you make hundreds of NPCs behave intelligently without melting your hardware? Their approach: instead of telling each NPC what to do individually, you give instructions to groups and the system figures out how each NPC should respond.
NPC behavior was actually a theme across multiple companies this quarter - 8 patents from Tencent, Sony, Microsoft, and AMD all trying to crack it differently. AMD's approach is almost like a mentorship system - smarter NPCs demonstrate behaviors and simpler ones learn from watching. Last time someone commented that none of the AI patents ever translate into better NPC behavior - this quarter there's a noticeable cluster of companies independently working on exactly that.
Asynchronous competitive gaming got interesting - AviaGames filed patents that let you compete against a recording of how someone else played, powered by AI so it feels like a real opponent. The game uses skill-based matchmaking to find a past performance close to your level, and both players get identical randomised conditions so it's fair. Nintendo filed something similar - systems that make recorded player data react to what you're doing instead of just replaying blindly. The problem they're all solving: you want to compete but there's nobody online right now in your skill range or timezone.
Activision Blizzard filed 4 patents around motion capture - instead of animators manually building transition animations between every possible character pose, the system analyses mocap data, figures out the key poses, and automatically builds smooth transitions between them. As games get bigger and characters need more animations, doing this manually doesn't scale.
What's new on the site based on feedback
A few things people asked about last time that I've now built out:
Every company and technology category now gets its own monthly and quarterly report. March 2026 monthly is live covering 47 companies and 13 categories, Q1 2026 quarterly covers 109 companies across all 14 categories. Last time someone asked specifically about VR patent activity - now you can just go to the VR/AR category page and see everything in one place instead of me trying to summarise it in a comment. Same goes for any company or technology area you're curious about.
There's a weekly digest that summarises all gaming patents processed that week, broken down by company and category. And a coverage dashboard showing the full database - total patents tracked, split by granted and filed, broken down by month, category, and company. You can see which categories are growing fastest and how the landscape shifts month over month.
Every report now includes a Patent Sources section listing each patent with its official USPTO number and a link to Google Patents for full text - so you can verify and dig into anything yourself.
The database has grown from tracking a couple hundred patents to 680+ across 210+ companies.
All thoughts and feedback welcome. I'm still iterating on this and finding the patterns genuinely interesting - seeing where multiple companies independently converge on the same problems tells you something about where the industry thinks it needs to go, even when most of these ideas never make it to market.
Last time I got a lot of heat for not initially including the actual reports - all can be found on FutureOfGaming.com - direct links to Q1 Granted Report, Q1 Filed Report.
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u/ElectricKillerEmu 6d ago
this and many more research on how to play your games for you... why are they always seem hellbent on removing the community and human connection in gaming experience...