It was just a couple of weeks ago that reports broke of Activision submitting a patent for an in-game system that would match-make players in multiplayer games to highlight purchasable items. Players who have not purchased items would be matched with players who have purchased items to potential drive the desire to make extra purchases themselves. Activision responded quickly by stating that none of their games currently have this system in play and the furor over the issue died down.
On October 21, 2017, Activision submitted another patent for microtransactions, this time for the ability to highlight purchasable content in live streams and other clips of its games. The patent is titled “System and method of identifying portions of video game streams for driving microtransactions,” just so there’s no question on whether or not this system is about microtransactions. The full patent text is quite wordy, and much of it talks about generating metadata loadouts of live streams and gameplay videos to have a better idea of many things, such as profile data of the player playing, character loadouts players are using, etc. Here’s the part that psecifically calls out microtransactions:
In some instances, a metadata track may include micro-transaction information that identifies an item available for purchase. In some instances, the item may include a virtual item depicted in a corresponding video game playback, or a real-world item advertised as an overlay o...