Watching an ad would earn players another block of ad-free play time, called a “credit”
“Looks like you’re about to kill the dragon. How about killing a sixpack of Miller Light?”
I generally don’t think F2P games are a very good deal for the player, regardless of the form that the monetization takes.
I’d just rather just pay up front and then have a good experience.
Me too, but clearly there’s a huge part of the market that would rather put up with ads than go with an alternative
Patent?
This is to refine existing F2P advert inserts so the timing is less abrupt. It is also for an ad-supported game-pass tier so they can inject ads into any game in the library.
Will it mean more developers/publishers choose to inject ads into games? Maybe. But plenty of games already have convenient spots for ads that don’t require this kind of tech, like match queuing, etc. and they don’t run ads.
Pretty sure that in a decade, the norm will be that ads are absolutely everywhere. Only holdouts (think Kojima etc) and tiny indie setups will be able to avoid it. Every AA+ title will be riddled with it, and just like you can’t imagine people just “accepting” that today, we couldn’t imagine people “just accepting” microtransactions fifteen years ago. Yet here we are.
Maybe Microsoft is patenting it so nobody will do this in the future. They have the best for the gamers in mind. /s
Wait, someone should make a gaming organization that just thinks of the most outlandish and ghoulish things to patent them so the big corpos can’t.
You think Microsoft has consumers best interests in mind? Are you serious? Like are you genuinely caping for Microsoft or am I missing something here?
My comment is sarcartic.
Yeah you are missing the /s at the end
Truth be told, that actually might be a neat thing to do. Imagine trying to think up really scummy ways to inject advertising into games, create new forms of mtx, etc. just to patent them and sit on those patents.
I feel like it would do a bit of the Streisand effect since by patenting them you’re making them known, but that could be a bit better than letting someone else figure it out and get exclusive use of that patent for years. Either way anyone checking gaming patents can learn about it, but in one situation it’s used for the duration of the patent and in the other its not.
Well, shoving adverts in front of gamers under the flimsiest of excuses will definitelly turn around the trend of game companies going bankrupts when Microsoft purchases them …
Putting aside that it’s idiotic anticonsumer patent. May I just ask here. How tf this even gets patented? Should I patent the act of showing the advertisement sign to my neighbors every time they open their door, so I can get exclusivity rights ownership on doing such an idiotic thing? Like why it gets accepted? It doesn’t sound even remotely technologically meaningful, neither it needs to withstand concurrency. It’s just a waste of tax money.
How tf this even gets patented?
It hasn’t, yet, afaict. Applying for a patent != it being granted.
As to the latent question of why Microsoft seems confident enough to try:
Because the times of a patent requiring to clear a reasonable inventive threshold (to actually be a motor for innovation) are far behind us. These days, patents’ principal (not exclusive) purpose imho is so big corporations can sue each other to grab some of the others’ earnings.
Loading screen games was patented, this doesn’t seem much different.
It’s just as shitty and funny as the one where Sony had a similar-looking mechanism where the viewer of their TVs is disrupted by an ad, then has to shout the name of the product to banish it away.
DRINK VERIFICATION CAN!
That one black mirror episode where you had limited credits to skip ads and the forced you to keep your eyes open to watch the unskippable ad if you didn’t have the credits. Enough said.
Seriously, what the hell are they thinking? Did they not come up with anything better? Oh well, now we definitely know we’re living in a dystopia at least.
🎶You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt Saint Peter don’t you call me, 'cause I can’t go I owe my soul to the company store🎶
What’s amazing is they are proposing to introduce such a scheme in the product that people aren’t forced to use.
I just won’t play those games. End of problem.
Until 95% of games have this, and you won’t have a choice.
THIS is what the new head of gaming came up with to save xbox? Lol.
lands the final hit against Margit in Elden Ring
“Tarnished… Have you heard about Burger King’s new Loaded Jalepeno Whopper? Now only $6.99.”
6.99 what is this 2015?
W H O P P E N H E I M E R
Is this an ad for Steam? /s
This is an ad for magnet links.
most patents never see implementation
I’ll be over here painting my tabletop minis. Fuck this.
