Nintendo Patents Watch

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Knowledge-based discourse

Anti-cheat Steganography in Screenshot

Occasionally there are patent drawings that have me scratching my head until I read through the text. Can anyone tell what the image below is about?

Drawing from patent US 20260054181: FIG. 4 shows an exemplary illustrative non-limiting drawing of a diagram illustrating a game image of an on-line competitive game according to the embodiment.

US20260054181 turns out to be an anti-cheat/debug feature that embeds an invisible watermark in a screenshot. Using LSB steganography, information such as user input, seed value, collision, game mode, etc. may be embedded in each pixel’s RGB bits. Devs can extract the data when receiving screenshots from players. User ID/console SN is not included for privacy reasons.

Excerpt from patent US 20260054181: [0068] Information on the game processing embedded by electronic watermark may be, for example, information indicating a cause that has caused the game processing. Specifically, the information includes information on the operation input from the user, parameter information of a character operated by the user, flag information, a seed value to be used for generation of a world (stage), and information to be used for determination as to collision (determination as to hitting) of an object. [0069] Alternatively, the information on the game processing embedded by electronic watermark may be, for example, information indicating which game processing has been performed. Specifically, the information includes an identifier indicating a mode of an executed game and an identifier with which matching performed in the game processing for an on-line competitive game can be specified. [0070] The identifier indicating the mode of the executed game may be, for example, information indicating what kind of game has been executed in an application where a plurality of types of games different in rule are executable.

For online matches, another embodiment of the patent only embeds the match ID and timestamp in each screenshot; the user input and other information are captured on the server. Devs can retrieve the data from server by looking up the ID and time extracted from the watermark.

Drawing from patent US 20260054181: FIG. 7 shows an exemplary illustrative non-limiting drawing of a diagram showing exemplary operation data associated with an identifier and time information, the operation data being transmitted to server 30.

[Originally posted on 2026-02-26 Pacific Time]