I’m doing number 2 as I read these comments

@siilly gamerAR Was that pund on purpose? LOL

did you read the story? it sure sounds automatic :
The invitee console would then trigger the game’s launch in the background if that player is in the middle of another game or simply watching a film etc.

An invite triggering the launch of a title on your console seems annoying but surely there has to be an option to opt-out of the automatic launching of games, otherwise, it’s just annoying.

How exactly does this work remains to be seen. What we do know for sure is that there is picture-in-picture if you choose to bring up the background process to run alongside whatever you are currently doing. Here are some key points from the full document.

Launching occurs without user intervention at the invitee computer device
Invitee console will show a gaming session launch window associated with the launching, based on the invitation
Invitee console will display the window as a picture-in-picture if other game processes or apps are running
The game will launch as a background process
Launching is occurring automatically with one or more applications are running in the foreground on invitee computing device

***did you read the story? it sure sounds automatic :***

You're speaking to concept versus UI design.

From a technical standpoint, their layout works perfectly fine. From a user design, they will obviously give the user an option to accept or decline the invitation. The patent isn't going to cover the accept/decline portion as it's irrelevant to the concept of the technology utilized, it's just additive and external to the premise.

@Christopher "The patent isn't going to cover the accept/decline portion as it's irrelevant to the concept of the technology utilized, it's just additive and external to the premise." - how is it irrelevant? If a step is present that allows for cancelling of the operation by invited than that would be surely germane to the process. As written it specifically excludes a process to cancel the operation up to the point of final invitation. It reads directly as a function that will not be preventable by invited and purely as an operation that will be completely automatic up until that point.

I know that it wouldn't automatically switch to the game. But I still don't want games loading in the background if I'm not playing them. It's unlikely that Sony wouldn't let us disable it, but I hope it isn't on by default to begin with.

People imagine a game launching as a relatively harmless and low tasked operation. When that is farthest from the truth. The reasons games take so long to load up is because they are demanding of resources and processing. Have to simply turn on your PC and start running apps and check your task manager to see the effects it has on your system. And if you are running an already high stacked process than starting another can deep end it quickly. So imagine this process has limiting factors to software being developed for the system. Surely not going to be able to make the most out of a systems specs if resources are being pulled for things like this. Sony talked about dedicated resourcing and this could be one of those things.

@Kill

which is why resources would probably be reserved for it. However, that pre-loading doesn't have to be done at full speed, and while there could be some debate over if they should take away resources for the devs on the game itself for what I'd call a marginal feature, the games will still get made within the limits that already exist. On PC, opening new programs will use all available system resources, giving priority to applications based on however it's set up to give priority to them. That priority can be controlled by either the system, the user, and on occasion the software. The problem on PC is that what may be available when that process starts with a new application may not be what it has when another demanding application needs those resources, which is why you have slowdown. On a console, this shouldn't be an issue, because certain things should be given all available resources, and would never have access to other resources that may handle this process.

It's really no different than Sony and MS both reserving memory and operating resources to do video capture, which one may not use at all, and even less use it in the way they promoted it on social media. With Sony on the PS4, they do have a dedicated co-processor for that, but it can still take up hard drive resources to flush the video into memory, and it will take up some reserved part of memory that could be used for games themselves. Not sure what Sony dedicates to that process, even if you don't use it, but I know that about 2.5 GB of the total system memory is used up for system purposes, with part of it being made available to games for system related tasks. PS5 is going to be the same way.

agreed. it's easy to join a party now - i don't see the need for something like this. i'd be surprised if this feature is included in the final product.

Its like the final episode of the Sapranos. You gonna go to make a comment and when you click add th-

Timezone thing maybe.... RIP