Call of Duty: Black Ops - Cold War is off to a banging start, setting a franchise record for highest first-day digital sales, but publisher Activision isn’t taking long to savor the game’s accolades. Instead, the company has filed for a patent that will allow you (and streamers) to issue challenges to followers and friends—while also allowing it to track their progress.

Activision is looking toward a future where you will be able to share your creations (guns, bases, race cars, etc.) through social media. Not just a picture of them, either, but everything about your custom things. The patent will allow you to share the code for your creation—in this case Call of Duty loadouts—in-game and on social media for your friends to use themselves.

Of course, this code will contain your player stats if you want it to. Activision wants to take full advantage of this fact by allowing you to challenge your friends to beat your stats using the same weapon. In the patent application, Activision says that the technology will allow you to place constraints on these challenges—time limits and gameplay sessions are specifically listed.

For example, if you use a gun for a week and rack up 500 kills with it, you can challenge your friends to beat your “high score” with the weapon in the same amount of time. Of course, for streamers, this means that you can create even more community interaction with the game. You can challenge all of your viewers to get more knife kills than you in a single day. Or you can challenge them—all of them—to prove the power of your loadout by getting a certain win-loss ratio.

It’s a unique mechanic that will, once again, set Call of Duty games apart from all others. That being said, Activision doesn’t appear to have any intention of limiting the technology to the Call of Duty Franchise. Considering that Activision’s full name is Activision-Blizzard, you can see how this would be something that World of Warcraft players would also like to see, for example. Activision could also choose to license the tech to other companies who would like to use the mechanic as well, so it could theoretically make its way to any game on any platform.

Unfortunately, there is no timeline for the release of this technology, nor is it guaranteed to even become reality. We hope that we will get to play with it though.

Source: US Patent Office