Console gamers are well aware that notifications sent while playing a game can be a frustrating event to deal with. Imagine playingRatchet & Clank: Rift ApartonPlayStation 5and reaching a particularly dramatic or action-intensive scene, only to receive an unrelated notification that pulls the player out of the experience. That’s a subject that Sony appears to be working to address, according to a new Sony Interactive Entertainment patent published this past Thursday.
According to Sony, pushing notifications to users while they’re playing a game or performing another activity on a device like aPS5can be better handled. Sony frames it as a different problem compared to what players might figure, however. According to Sony, the issue to be solved revolves around not being able to fully share important notification information. For example, messages from friends, download and installation status updates, or social updates like friends “liking” a screenshot.
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To address this problem, Sony’s patented an idea that allows players to parse and queue notifications so that they can be shared at more opportune moments. For example, if someone is playing aracing game on their PS5, certain deprioritized notifications won’t be shown by the PS5. Instead, they’ll be queued so that they can be shared in full when the player isn’t in a situation where they’d be distracted from these notifications.
This queuing system would also have some intelligence to it. It wouldn’t be a simple list, but would instead sort itself based on priority. Some notifications would move to the top of the list so that they would be shared with the player earlier, whereas lessimportant PS5 notificationswould move to the bottom of the list and be shown later. Even if they aren’t so important that the PS5 user wants them mid-game, that doesn’t mean that they aren’t important messages that the user would want as soon as is appropriate.
The patent also provides some guidance regarding what types of notifications would or wouldn’t be parsed onto a queue. The potentialPS5 userwould be able to select which notifications were shown immediately versus which would be queued.
Sony Interactive Entertainment’s new patent obviously isn’t anything that will dramatically change a PS5 owner’s experience. Still, it’s a look into some of the more intricate design that goes into improving a console like thePS5’s user interface. For now, this is just a patent. It doesn’t mean Sony has any plans to improve or iterate on the PS5’s current notification system. But it does show Sony is evaluating the PS5’s user interface as it currently exists and could have changes coming down the line.
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