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.

Just wanted to add: and by the power of the incredible force called "taste", in many cases one mans trash is another ones treasure.

FAFO, stapitalism stans

Yeah these big players are acting like we still have the scale of choice from the 90s

Get? Use an old phone

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

I'll be over here painting my tabletop minis. Fuck this.

DRINK VERIFICATION CAN!

This is an ad for magnet links.

W H O P P E N H E I M E R

Had that back in NFSU too.

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).

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.

Not Fafe Sor Uggos

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.

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?

See Dave the Diver for a corporate game people assume is indie because of its style

🎶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🎶

Bury your hobby with that attitude. There are and there always has been studios that decide intentionally to keep their projects small in scope.

most patents never see implementation

Pepsi? Partial Credit.

6.99 what is this 2015?

https://www.xbox.com/en-us/apps/xbox-app-on-pc

Honestly the indies are the only ones worth your time and money. Just pirate the big studio bullshit

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.

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 ...

Maybe Microsoft is patenting it so nobody will do this in the future. They have the best for the gamers in mind. /s

Suicide.

Loading screen games was patented, this doesn't seem much different.

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.

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.

That's mobile games basically

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.

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.

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.

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.

Me too, but clearly there's a huge part of the market that would rather put up with ads than go with an alternative

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?

Indies have been far more satisfying for me over the last five years or so; many wonderful gems out there.

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.

Yeah you are missing the /s at the end

Until 95% of games have this, and you won't have a choice.

Patent?

My comment is sarcastic.

Don’t forget they bought Activision and own games like Diablo and WoW.

"Looks like you're about to kill the dragon. How about killing a sixpack of Miller Light?"

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.

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.

Kojima put monster energy ads into death stranding

McDonald's!! \o/

they need to make money, i don't feel it wrong to try to milk every possible angle