Dealing with smurfs in competitive games is an awful experience and something that game devs have tried to deal with for years with little success. You can either look at player behavior to determine whether it is a second account or trace their IP. However, analyzing individual behavior takes a lot of time, and IP bans at times can cause issues, especially in internet cafes where one person can prevent the entire venue sharing the public internet connection from connecting to that game.
Sony seems to have found its own solution to this, and it identifies player behavior, only much more efficiently. The patent titled “Gameplay Characteristics for Player Identification” was published on November 5, 2026. It explains a system that identifies players through controller behavior, including button presses, duration of a button press, menu navigation, playing patterns, skill level, etc. This can effectively determine whether players have a second account and move toward an appropriate response.
“The user interacting with an input device can cause one or more user interaction signals to be generated. Examples of the input device can include a mouse, a keyboard, a keypad, a video game controller, a touch screen, etc. The user interaction data can include a timing parameter related to the user interaction signals. For example, the timing parameter can indicate a duration of a key press, a button press, or another user interaction with the input device. As another example, the timing parameter can indicate a time between key presses or other suitable user input.”
The technology doesn’t appear to be limited to Sony Interactive Entertainment’s console family only; it takes a general approach of all platforms, as highlighted in the above example. Moreover, it’s not just an AI model that recognizes these patterns. The patent does give most of its implementation examples as an AI system, but in some of these implementations, it highlights how “the computing system can include a computing device that can run or execute a pattern recognition program.”
Claim 1 of the patent discusses matching players based on their characteristics to ascertain the possibility of a player using a second account. The system determines “whether the first set of one or more characteristics of the user interaction data match a second set of one or more characteristics of different user interaction data associated with a second player account interacting with the gaming platform.”
It also analyses gameplay to assess the player skill level and compares it with historical information to determine whether it is a second account of an existing player. We should also mention that one account can sometimes have multiple users, and it’s unclear how effective this system would be at recognizing that. Can it flag one account as a second account of two or more players? That could be a major limitation of this idea.
The system also creates an alert once it confirms the second account and sends that alert to the fraud unit of a game platform manufacturer. The patent also specifically mentions that the fraud unit can then use this alert to ban both accounts of a player or restrict their access. How would this work alongside existing anti-cheats? And can it even coexist with them, especially since they can be finicky and consider other third-party software with deep PC access as potential cheating software? Whether Sony has even considered those things or plans on tackling them next is something we would love to know.
Source: Patent number US-20260346147-A1 on USPTO
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Mudassir carries years of experience as a journalist and embodies that in his articles. His motto is "All great ideas come while writing." When he's not interviewing someone, he's on…
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