Microsoft patent describes in-game advertising triggered by boss fights, loading screens, and cutscenes
TechSpot
Microsoft patent describes in-game advertising triggered by boss fights, loading screens, and cutscenes
The filing points to a possible ad-supported model for PC and console games that is less disruptive than the approaches commonly used in mobile titles.
Watching an ad would earn players another block of ad-free play time, called a “credit”
good thing they patented this shit, it can die with them now
If Microsoft lets the patent sit idle and refuses to license it to others, it would be a very good thing for a few years. Let’s see what happens, though.
This is the time for the usual reminder that tech giants obtain something like 3000 patents each a year, by patenting everything under the sun. For the sole purpose that if one of them sues another for the violation of one such patent, the other can dig up a hundred of them to countersue.
Please drink verification can.
15 years ago and accurate as fuck
Put ads in my games and I’ll stop playing your games. Simple as. Plenty of indies out there are more deserving of my time.
And retro games to emulate.
Indies, romhacks, fangames, recompilations, mods, etc can extend the life of any game nowadays.
I remember feeling bad about how the original PvZ was absolutely wasted on EA, who made sequels that are just mobile slop. Relatively recently I found out that a huge community exists to make more of the good stuff and it’s legitimately overwhelming how much community stuff there exists for this one game alone.
The other obvious example is Minecraft which for me has basically just been a platform for individual mod packs that are basically their own games. And of course, Skyrim. I’ll get back to that one day.
Am I turning into those people I used to see all over forums when I was a kid talking about games from the 90s that didn’t seem that compelling to me?
They can even make Pokemon games fun to play as an adult.
So many games on sale I want to play, backlog infinite
Yeah these big players are acting like we still have the scale of choice from the 90s
Honestly the indies are the only ones worth your time and money. Just pirate the big studio bullshit
There was Prototype, which experimented with in game ads a while back. They sold ads on the billboards in NYC in the game. They seemed less obtrusive
Had that back in NFSU too.
Not Fafe Sor Uggos
I wouldn’t mind ads like how Trackmania does it, you can disable them from options or have it show only TM related stuff (clubs, events, cotd).
Football manager have always had “let’s kick racism out of football” and other NGOs represented on their banners - Because they had no clue what to do with it, I’m pretty sure there’s a settings option to replace them with real paid ads now
Yeah, I actually wouldn’t mind that. It’s integrated and not all up your nose about it. Probably the only way in-game ads wouldn’t piss me off.
Indies have been far more satisfying for me over the last five years or so; many wonderful gems out there.
As a millennial, I’ve watched the rise and fall of many things. Never thought I’d see the entire fall of gaming and so soon following its rise.
Indie games are booming lately, if you think you’re witnessing the fall of gaming you’re simply looking in the wrong place.
Both can be true
and those indie companies will get bigger, become corporatized, and continue the cycle.
Just like the ones before them did, just like the ones after them will.
The good thing is that creating a game is a task a person or a small team can accomplish even with non-AAA money, and there are many people out there who want to create something. So even if some of those indies become corrupted, there will always be more people out there who want to build their vision.
And tbh, if from this moment on only crap came out, we already have decades of great games to play - i for my part would never run out of games until the day i die even if i stopped adding stuff to my library - i am sitting on ca. 37000 titles at the moment. If the average time to complete is around 20 hours, that’s around 83 years of continuous gaming, much more than my estimated remaining lifetime.
yeah, anyone can make a game. that game will probably be a slop generic asset flip game, but still technically a game.
to make a good game takes years, and money, and either knowledge or time available to be spent pursuing that knowledge…while also working an actual job to actually pay for all the bills for everyday life, in addition to what the game needs.
Yes. That’s how art works.
Most musicians, including many bands that fill stadiums and go on world tours, pay the bills with regular full-time jobs and do all of their band stuff in their spare time. It’s similar for artists, authors, etc.
A really good game takes years of hard work. It can take surprisingly little money; a small team driven by passion can be very efficient. But it does take effort. And sure, not everyone can be Tynan Sylvester or ConcernedApe or Pixel or Team Cherry; most tiny indie games aren’t genre-shaping mega hits.
But they don’t have to. There’s plenty of small games out there that are just good and that’s good enough. The idea of even just a hundred people playing one’s game and being entertained is enticing enough for thousands of developers to sink hours and hours of their spare time into.
Will there be a bazillion lame asset flips in the future? Yes, just like there have always been lame derivative bands, shitty overhyped artists, terrible indie movies, and drivel-slinging hack authors.
Just like there have always been shitty AA and AAA games, for that matter. 90% of everything is crap. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of gems hiding in between all the chaff.
(And while I’m at it: While making a game does requires a lot of knowledge, that knowledge can be acquired along the way. The original Cave Story was a one-man project and Pixel certainly didn’t start out as a professional programmer/artist/composer/screenplay author. Learning how to do all that is part of the fun for some people.)
Just wanted to add: and by the power of the incredible force called “taste”, in many cases one mans trash is another ones treasure.
See Dave the Diver for a corporate game people assume is indie because of its style
Bury your hobby with that attitude. There are and there always has been studios that decide intentionally to keep their projects small in scope.
Wealth doesn’t trickle down, but losses do. Sadly, AAA studios collapsing will affect indies’ abilities to get funding , so expect to feel some pain there too.
This is already being felt these last few years as many gaming publishers shifted to funding AI.
I think it’s just the fall of the industry as we know it. I don’t think gaming is going away anytime soon. But I do think we are about to see a very different industry in a few years. It probably won’t look like it ever really has before. A massive indie space, with sparse few AAA titles.
Capitalism knows no sentimentality.
That’s mobile games basically
Microsoft != gaming.
Why does this feel more relavent suddenly
Its relevance increases every year. Truly it was prophetic.
DRINK VERIFICATION CAN!
ROFL Oh hell no, that would get me to never buy a game with this feature enabled. I would wait and figure out if said feature were present.
It’s your 30th boss run. As you fuck up your sixth dodge roll in a row, the Troll picks up your character. He roars over the screams of your avatar as he crushes it’s ribs in its massive fist.
Then, as he raises you high over head, and opens wide to chomp down on your head, the actions stops. The Troll turns to the camera and smiles, showing off brilliant pearly whites. “Colgate is recommended by 9/10 dentists.”, the troll effuses over the screaming.
A text box appears.
‘To proceed, type the number of dentists Colgate is recommended by, followed by this random number “N”.’
I mean, if it just stopped at the troll saying “…9/10 dentists….” That would be pretty fucking funny
I was going to add that the avatar was already dead, and it was your screaming the troll was talking over, because this is the 30th time you’d heard the ad
i think a popup will just show in the middle of the fight obscuring everything. “you have alloted 30minutes of boss battle, please watch ads to continue”
Most people would count Black mirror as a dystopian science fiction nightmare. Microslop on the other hand saw “15 million credits” and pitched it to their shareholders.
Oh good. I was only 98% sure I was done buying consoles forever. It’s good to really know.
I might make exceptions for consoles/devices that run linux off the shelf. (I want to get a steam frame, ok?)
The patent seems to be for PC games though I’m sure it would apply to both.
Microsoft don’t have a distribution platform for PC games, even when they did no one used it. So they will only be able to introduce this in games that they are the publisher for, which is actually not that many games.
I’m very sure steam already prohibits in-game advertising. So Microsoft would have to distribute these games themselves and the moment that any publisher decides to go their own route they immediately decrease their revenue, even if nothing else has changed.
www.xbox.com/en-us/apps/xbox-app-on-pc
Don’t forget they bought Activision and own games like Diablo and WoW.
Just get an emulation handheld. With Steam offering ARM support through a translation layer, a strong one can even run a surprising array of PC games these days. My Retroid Pocket Flip 2 isn’t even that nice as far as these things go, and it plays just about any 2D game I’ve tried and a lot of 3D from the '00s and early '10s, later if they don’t press limits. You can also attach them to TVs and use normal controllers, including multiplayer.
Get? Use an old phone
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.
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.
Then they do it on the OS, forcing people to swap to Linux - But the majority of users wouldn’t know how
Until 95% of games have this, and you won’t have a choice.
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.
Wait, that’s a cool idea
And then sue the shit of them whenever they implement it without realizing its patented.
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.
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?
Yeah you are missing the /s at the end
Well to be fair it wasn’t there when I first commented bud.
My comment is sarcastic.
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?
Sometimes I think due process should have its limits. When people suggest ideas that are so grossly enshittified, we should be able to beat them with sticks.
I’m glad to see this used for this. I see you are another person of culture.
I can hear that photo
I AM A BANANA
Is this an ad for Steam? /s
This is an ad for magnet links.
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 …
Additionally let’s not have video game characters say any swear words or bad words like “kill” to make it more advertiser friendly.
Quest: “Unalive 10 cave troll’s and get your reward from Dr. Pepper”
hahaha
Imagine coming up with this idea and presenting it to your superiors instead of being so disgusted with yourself that you immediately splatter your brains all over the ceiling.
they need to make money, i don’t feel it wrong to try to milk every possible angle
Your mother’s corpse had teeth, right?
Some teeth have fillings… some fillings are made of valuable metals.
The Disney corporation should exhume the corpse of your loved ones and sell their teeth on eBay - they need to make money… right?
It’s the only way to be sure every POSSIBLE angle has been milked.
You’re comparing a non-consensual crime to a voluntary consumer product. Unlawfully exhuming a corpse leaves the victim and family with zero say in the matter.
A video game gives you complete choice, if a developer milks a game with ads, you can choose to uninstall it and give them zero dollars. Try making an analogy that actually deals with voluntary choice, because grave robbery isn’t it.
Why not use a realistic analogy? Like how some car companies tried charging monthly subscriptions to activate built-in features like heated seats or remote start. BMW eventually killed that feature specifically because subscription sales were so extremely low. That’s a real example of consumer choice driving corporate decisions, not grave robbery.
Laws (and crimes) and consumer behaviors are governed by popular concensus of what we, the body politic, are willing to tolerate - neither are absolutes, and both are subject to change.
A realistic analogy would make my point less clearly than an exaggerated cartoon.
If the consumer market, or the corporations that govern it, decide that grave robbery is to be tolerated as a for-profit adventure…
well, we’ve very few tools with with to oppose them.
(See also: the collapse of the biosphere)
Fortunately, in America at least, It’s likely your loved ones lacked the medical insurance necessary to cover the cost of dental fillings.
You’re right that social norms shift, but fundamental legal protections don’t evaporate overnight, especially in democratic nations with institutional checks. Suggesting that society will casually normalize grave robbery for profit within our lifetimes isn’t realistic.
Admitting that your argument relies on an “exaggerated cartoon” proves that your logic isn’t realistic. Video game ads are a voluntary consumer choice, but grave robbery is a non-consensual crime.
If you want a realistic corporate greed analogy, look at a company intentionally polluting the air and then selling clean air filters to profit off the damage. At least that deals with actual market behavior instead of shock value crime scenarios.
I might agree that it’s not morally wrong for them to add advertisements to milk more money out of people, but it’s definitely artistically wrong in that they are hugely compromising the thing they are making just for extra money.
And one might further argue that it’s morally wrong in that adding the advertisements is going to make the world a more frustrating, enshittified, dumbed-down place, just by a little bit.
Maybe a more apt comparison than “what if a Nazi killed you” or “what if somebody stole your mother’s teeth” would be what if you owned a food company and filled your food with sticks and rocks to save money. People would not be obligated to buy it, but it’s definitely wrong and doesn’t do anybody any good.
Didn’t you just prove my point? If nobody buys food because I put rocks and sticks in it, I go out of business. That’s exactly how consumer choice forces bad ideas to fail
I agree that people should stop buying it. But people are stupid and also manipulated by advertising, brand loyalty, and irrationality
I think they were trying to make an argument regarding ethics and morality and didn’t do the best job by throwing in a strawman argument. That being said, television networks literally do it every day. That they’re doing it is arguably unethical, but if you’re expecting ethics and morality from a megacorp, especially Micro$oft, you’re a fool.
Everything else you said stands. Don’t use the product. Don’t give the company your money. Nobody’s forcing you to consume the media. If you do, don’t complain, you’re the fool who bought a game with ads.
Many are tired of being milked at every possible angle.
That’s the problem. The milking.
but its their job, they will stop doing it if everyone stop playing the game
u can’t blame them for doing their job, when people still playing the game
“Just doing my job”
-Some random Nazi soldier
why people keep making stupid comparison? why? just an effort to make my stand is morally wrong?
those people that got kill by the nazi have no choice, they cant simply refuse to get kill or got drag to the camp
do the game developer forces you to play their game? its your choice whether to play it or not
Because you’re going to great lengths to defend a form of enshitification.
It sounds like you don’t know what you’re talking about. Bad thing is bad thing is bad. Period.
But what actually makes it bad? Is making a game and wanting to get a financial benefit out of it inherently wrong?
Why doesn’t that same logic apply to celebrities doing brand endorsements, shoving products down our throats that they probably don’t even use just because they are famous? And don’t forget product placement in movies.
Also, developing a modern video game can cost hundreds of millions of dollars, and if it flops, it’s just a dead loss. Unlike movies, which can recoup losses through streaming deals or cable rights, a bad video game usually means nobody plays it and the studio loses everything. That is a massive financial risk.
Where do you draw the line?
I was not weighing in on whether or not adding advertisements is a bad thing. I was pointing out how flawed your logic is. “Just doing their job” is not a good defense for the job being done.
What do you mean? You were the one who brought morality into this by comparing game developers to Nazi soldiers.
You claim that ‘just doing their job’ isn’t a valid defense, but how else am I supposed to look at it? It is literally their job to find new ways to monetize a product. If a company pushes a bad strategy, consumers can just stop playing and paying, like when BMW tried subscription heated seats and failed because of low sales. Blaming employees for doing what they are hired to do, while people keep playing the game, makes no sense. Trying new ways to make money isn’t a moral crime; it’s just business.
I did not compare game developers to Nazis. I gave you an example where “just doing their job” is clearly not a useful defense. I was attempting to point out that “just doing their job” is actually never a good defense. It is not relevant to whether or not the job being done should be done.
Is it hard to type, or to see the screen, with all those corporate dicks in your mouth?
People like you are the reason everything is getting worse all the time. Keep your worthless opinions to yourself.
Why? Because I accept that businesses exist to make money, not out of the goodness of their hearts?
If you think a system or game is predatory, the solution is simple: stop supporting it. If enough people actually vote with their wallets, companies are forced to change because it hurts their bottom line. Throwing tantrums online doesn’t change basic economic incentives, consumer behavior does
Yes, there’s no reason you need to carry water for them. These dipshits shouldn’t be able to find a single comment online supporting their behavior. They should feel shitty and worthless about what they’re doing every second of their miserable existence. Companies can make plenty of money without enshittifying every single aspect of our lives.
Sure, and I have a lower threshold for it than most but these companies will keep tightening the screws forever because there will always be new people coming in where the current level of bullshit is normal and they can push those people even further. My resistance to it alone accomplishes nothing.
Your point about normalization and the domino effect actually makes sense, and i agree with you on this
My main reason for leaning so heavily against that original post was that they were telling people to off themselves just for wanting to make money. Corporate monetization might be annoying, but suggesting suicide over it is way out of line.
Oh, I just realized you’re the original commenter XD
Why didn’t you lead with a reasonable argument in the first place, rather than suggesting self-harm or dismissing other points of view? I actually agree with you on the domino effect, even though it doesn’t really change my core view that businesses naturally try to milk it
Because I want them to kill themselves.
Maybe you should apply your advice to yourself on this one.
“If you hate the US you should move”-ass take.
i think its more like “if you hate the hotel service you should move”
I’m generally against software patents, but I kinda like that this was patented. Maybe the patent will prevent other companies from enshittifying their games.
Or it will get licensed
but it still gonna deter the usage, because in order to make it profitable they have to put more ads without making too obnoxious
Just don’t play those games.
Found the G.O.G. user
Heh. I know this was meant as a joke, but I don’t use use GOG (mostly because it has very few games I care to play), but I also don’t play those games.
i suggesting the same stuff as you, but i got bomb with downvote XD
“Looks like you’re about to kill the dragon. How about killing a sixpack of Miller Light?”
I always figured that this would be added for xbox within a year or two, but if they try for PC I really will go onto one of the linux wikis and start swapping immediately.
I’d suggest just setting aside some time on a weekend to just nuke windows and dive in. Something like cachy os is great for gaming, or bazzite if you’d like the system files indeleble like steam os.
I ended up wiping my last windows install a few months back and I don’t miss it at all.
I have an older laptop that I was actually thinking about experimenting with first, just to give myself some confidence in figuring everything out.
I’ve been stalling on that though.
Make a live USB and just fiddle around with it. Note that a proper install on NVME will be much snappier. Don’t nuke Windows until you understand the basics of Linux and have decided you want to daily drive it. Back up your data of course. Dual boot is often more trouble that it’s worth, Windows loves to fuck up your bootloader and partitions, I got fed up unfucking it and began unplugging my Linux drives while updating Windows, and eventually just wiped it.
If you’re serious about it, try to source hardware that is well supported rather than just slap it on a random machine and hope for the best.
This is what I usually recommend to my friends who are interested if they have the hardware to spare. Sometimes I even gift them a machine if I have one to spare (mostly back when hardware was cheaper). This way you can also try out multiple distros without caring to find out which one you like best as well.
I swapped to full-time Linux last October. It’s literally no difference for me since I use zero highly specialized software except maybe my mouse and headset software.
My guess is it will go into Xbox/Gamepass on PC, and in MS games, but not in other launcher ecosystems.
Still, go ahead and start researching. Whether it’s this or something else, something will be the final straw for you in Windows, soon.
While ad free implies being on some sort of game pass (fuck that now as it is), I would sooner go back to board games before ever even considering a game with this included. Companies buying virtual billboards was gross enough.
Big props to M$ for patenting this so when they inevitably fuck it up, it’s off the table for others.
Don’t give them any ideas for trying to make persistent ads in those too. Monopoly would ironically be the first.
You’re trying to tell me the countless reskins aren’t just ads?
Why have you done this.
The patent system is broken. This is such a simple concept, even if a terrible one that sucks.
This is a patent application. Many applications are filed for terrible and/or fundamentally unpatentable ideas. Even by huge companies.
Yeah, I was wondering if they are trying to use USPTO incompetence to destroy the mobile gaming industry.
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.
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.
Sounds like something that would yank me out of the immersion every time. Why would anyone agree to that b.s.
patenting stuff and using it, is two different thing
At the very least the are leveraging the law to ensure they are the only ones allowed to do this kind of evil.
isnt that good? so ea cant use it XD
Doesn’t mean M$ wouldn’t take EA money to license it’s use
I’ll be over here painting my tabletop minis. Fuck this.
I am assuming this means they are planning on adding a “free with ads” tier to Xbox Cloud Game Streaming. Which doesn’t really bother me that much if its a free tier. But if they add this to paid tiers or full games that would probably lose them a lot of goodwill that Asha seems to be pretty keen on regaining lately.
As usual, it’s going to be only for the free, or “cheaper” tier at first, then it will creep up to the other tiers. We’ve seen this happen time and again.
Then it will go full circle like Disney+ who just eliminated any tier without ads.
No amount of money will get you Disney+ without ads now.
I generally don’t think F2P games are a very good deal for the player, regardless of the form thst the monetization takes.
I’d just rather just pay up front and then have a good experience.
It really depends. There are great examples like DOTA2 and Path of Exile, and miserable examples, like every crappy gacha game.
Riot is kinda in the middle for me. Shame they nuked 2XKO after not telling anyone about it or catering to the people they neglected to tell about it.
What grinds my gears is when a game ends up not what you expected. One of the only games I returned was Doom Eternal, I bought it and hated it and this is from someone who’s played all the doom games and even made maps for fun. I got it again for a dollar off of humble bundle and I will probably never play it.
Same goes for The Outer Worlds. I was excited about it. The whole epic launcher thing saved me the full price. Got it years later with all the dlc for $1. Played it and found it to not be as fun as I thought it was going to be.
What didn’t you like about Doom Eternal? That one was widely praised.
I think part of the reason it was highly praised was because I imagine it was a lot of peoples first Doom game. Like Doom 2016 and Doom 3, it was also something a bit different.
I didn’t like the scarcity of ammo and constantly have to see and hear the stupid chainsaw. And the cinematic kills everything got really annoying as well. The level design was okay, but felt very restricted compared to Doom 2016, also invisible walls. It felt slow and I didn’t care for the jumping mechanics, what is this Super Mario? I didn’t make it to playing it two hours since I returned it, I’m sure it probably got better but I didn’t feel like playing it.
I didn’t like the mandatory finishing moves either, and to be honest, I didn’t finish the game, but I got a lot further than DOOM 2016 and I thought the gunplay felt really snappy and satisfying in the way the OG games did. The levels were diverse and I actually liked the platforming puzzles, but I’m also the kind of guy who played surf maps in CounterStrike and strafejump races in Quake, so I’m predisposed to that sort of thing.
Oh well. They made a thing and it’s not for everyone. I wonder if you’d like The Dark Age. I haven’t played it yet.
Hah in CS I played a lot of the Jailbreak mod. Actually played a bit in CSGO but it wasn’t the same. I actually didn’t look into Dark Age until you brought it up but it does look like they got the message that the finishing moves and walking through a map weren’t exactly everyone’s favorite concepts. I’ll probably get it when it’s on sale, it looks a lot more fast paced. I might be a minority on this but I miss the faster paced games like Painkiller and well UT2003 on double speed and double damage.
Check out some Doom Eternal speedruns. (I guess 100% speedruns so you aren’t seeing people glitching through the game.) That game is actually extremely fast-paced. Good players are swapping through all fifty of their weapons every 4 seconds. Come to think of it, I wonder if the need for gore kills is a consequence of me sucking. (I think the chainsaw for ammo is unavoidable, though.)
Me too, but clearly there’s a huge part of the market that would rather put up with ads than go with an alternative
because that f2p game, would cost u more money than buying the game upfront
i spend like 80-90 dollar on dota2 cosmetic, plus 2 battlepasses and its levels
Reminder: mobile games have had ad = benefit for over a decade. However, this sounds like the reverse (get a credit = no ads or ad free time).
Roblox has had integrated ads for some time, typically diegetic ads on in game billboards. Some of these integrations go less noticed because of the parallel to the real world & they aren’t disruptive of gameplay flow.
Microsoft is welcome to try this pattern, but it’ll likely require developers to be heavily incented to do so. Given that MS just downsized, meaning they have less first parties & have rightfully angered some pockets of the game development world, I feel like their only option here is lots of money or force the loop. Forcing this loop will damage the total addressable market, unless it’s used for F2P games.
Long story, short: they may be patenting this, but they have a long, uphill battle to get this to work in any sort of paid, AAA game/product. They would need an amazing draw to pull people passed it, and a lot of their brands don’t have the draw they used to (see Halo Infinite).
I'm sure this has been done before. stupid web clicker city builder or whatever that if you watch advert you et more in game credits.
It might not be exactly the same but surely not novel enough to be patentable, prior art. Or in this case prior twat.
USPTO changed its rules in 2013; prior art only counts if it was patented first. This is why Nintendo has been trying to patent stuff other companies are doing that is similar to their games (eg PalWorld).
Part of me wishes Nintendo was doing this to lose on purpose so there is precedent to not use this against them in the future, but I’ve become far too pessimistic for a “good-guy Nintendo” arc…
The shareholder will love that Literally everyone else, though…
With some of the shit people put up with nowadays in games, they would probably swallow this up too, in some capacity.
Oh, then wait and see if game has advertising tripe in game and make sure not to buy. Got it.
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.
McDonald’s!! \o/
Bethesda really missed the memo with Starfield. All those wasted loading screens…
ES6 loading screens will have Fan Duel and GLP-1 ads
There is a reason I hardly play on mobile.
I think the only games I have on my phone are Walkscape and Luck Be A Landlord.
I’d suggest looking through F-Droid, IzzyOnDroid and other FOSS repos for mobile games. I’ve found a bunch of mobile games that have as much depth as the ad-laden ones.
Hell, the reason I got back into mobile gaming recently was because the developer of Poinpy decided to make their game free on Google Play, remove microtransactions, and make the entire game playable from start to finish with extra modes. It feels like a Nintendo game in the best possible way. The main character Poinpy even looks like Kirby, which is reinforced by the ending of the game.
It’s ironic that even Nintendo hasn’t gotten mobile gaming down pat, either going the gacha route with Mario Kart Tour and Fire Emblem: Waifus, or trying to do the paid model and failing at it with Mario Run and Animal Crossing: Pocket Camp.
We are assisting to triple A games fall and indie’s boom
[deleted]
most patents never see implementation
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.
Kojima put monster energy ads into death stranding
Ads are already everywhere, nobody said anything about it being unimaginable. You have product placement (especially IP crossovers) in lots of live service games. That doesn’t mean you won’t be able to pay for an ad free experience. You can watch a movie on cable TV with ads every 15min, or buy the movie, or rent it, or stream it ad-supported/ad-free or go to the movie-theater with front-end ads. If you don’t want to watch Dune with a commercial break interrupting the middle, there’s an option for that.
Or the ads are incidental to the aesthetics of the activity, like sponsor ads on sports jerseys, in the stadium, and TV/stream. So what if the car chasing James Bond is an Audi because they paid for that.
I’m not pro-advertising, I do think “all major gaming experiences will be ruined with advertising” is a bit overblown.
Sounds like a whole lotta words to say the future of non shit entertainment flies a black flag
There’s always a black flag.
“to deliver last blow to the final boss, please watch these 10 minutes of ads. failure to do so will restore the boss to full health”
Makes you wonder given the timing of announcing every tier of game pass will now include (very) limited monthly cloud gaming hours. I think I saw ultimate would include 15 h/mo. With yet unannounced pricing on how much an extra hour would cost, what if ads end up being their solution… 🤔
Lol, who the duck only games for 15 hrs/month
Is that when they pay us to play these games? AAA gaming will die a horrible death if they do this.
Farmville all over again.
Relevant Bill Hicks’ standup comedy routine.
These fucks won’t rest until we have ads playing directly into our brain via chip implants 24x7
can imagine if that what elon planning XD
Patent?
FAFO, stapitalism stans
Well I guess it’s good they patented it, at least that means the others can’t do it.
I question why they would give their own games such a disadvantage, but whatever
Suicide.
Just when I thought we have reached maximum ad saturation. Do they think these ads actually do anything anymore or is it just wishful thinking pushed by marketing execs? I’m waiting for electronic door locks to make you watch an ad to enter your home or car.
tbh, i would love to watch ads about indomie when i play game, at least i will have reason to eat it and it remind me of the good ol day of internet cafe
I “want” ads in games to be integrated like into YouTube videos.