"It makes games more accessible for everyone! If a player does not want to experience ads, then they can purchase the game at full price!"

They are tired of people not buying their shitty games, so they want a way to at least make a bit of money before the servers go down.

Or they just want to make more money off of everyone.

They really are trying alienate their users.

Drink verification can

And then after a while, the rug will be pulled and paid tiers will have ads too.

Yeah, do patent this microsoft, good thing only your crappy games will have this

No, no... Paid tiers will get relevant and targeted ads, to make the experience more immersive and personal! And if people don't want it, they can opt out with a small additional fee! This will enable us to provide a better experience for everyone!

Who doesn't want a better experience?

Every day we veer closer to that Black Mirror episode.

"Which black mirror episode?"

"Yes."

killstreak reward: force entire enemy team to watch an ad break immediately in the middle of the match

Optting out will just result in generic, untargeted ads, doesn't everyone want ads targeted to them specifically?! Don't we all just love ads?!? Everyone loves ads right? Especially when they are tailored specifically to you right?! So personal, what else could anyone want from anything?

They never cared about their users -- only their investors.

Stop giving them ideas!

Well, I am glad it is Microslop patenting this. That means it will only ever be used in a handful of games noone evert plays before xbox goes completely belly up.

It's sad that almost none of the tech companies remain in the business that made them rich and powerful, they all kept that core business only as bait, but they switched to "sucking their victims dry" business

probably going to be AI-GENERATED ads too.

menu requires to watch 3 minutes ads/hr. BOSS battles(5 3 minute adds interesect in the length it takes to kill a boss)

once they destroy BLIZZARD with ads it will be over.

I've lost hearing young due to a health condition. The sales model for hearing aids is depressingly close to the Black Mirror episode with Rashida Jones.
The hearing aid costs 15 per month on "basic", rising through eight different tiers, to "platinum plus" at 120 per month. The hardware doesn't change, only the software. So if you want to be able to hear nature sounds, that's an extra 10 per month. An extra 20 to hear conversations in the car. It's 50 if you want to be able to go to a concert, and so on.
The hearing aid itself is capable of doing all of that, all the time, but the functionality is just switched off.
The term is 4 years and then it becomes obsolete and receives no further updates; you have to get a new one.
This is in the UK.

There’s enough old good games to last me the rest of my life without giving any money to these evil companies

So, is this the second or third stage of enshittification?

Bright future ahead. Robot dogs will hunt you down and cut you to pieces. Before you die, your brain is scanned, and the copy will be tortured as long as the machine has power.

Yeah good luck with that. I'll stick with windows xp games if I have to. I'd rather play playstation 2 games than sit through ads on modern hardware. Amiga games, even.

The tech industry is an oligopoly. Microsoft, Nvidia and Google control everything. Nvidia has an actual monopoly.

What the fuck. Is this real?

lol mobile platforms have been doing this for what decades at this point.

Lmfao

Yes, but the issue goes even deeper. Microsoft has no monopoly in gaming, but that doesn't stop them from acting like they did (for example recent Xbox life price increases), and the competition instead of pushing them out of the market, does their own stupid shit (you don't own your digital Playstation games... We said you do?!? Oh, we were just kidding).

Instead of fighting for new customers all big companies focus on extracting as much money as possible out of existing customers. It's like they are fighting us (customers) instead of each other.

It is. They tend to hide this until the hard sell, but here's a little bit of info that I could find: https://www.bootshearingcare.com/hearing-aids/hearing-aid-prices/

There's more info that's only revealed after your second hearing test, when they put the "platinum plus" software driven device on your ears, then reveal the pricing in a handily confusing leaflet. It's similar at Specsavers where I went after, thinking "is this real? Surely they're not all like this"

Are their investors morons?

What’s the point of that, like are the people enemies of the state or something for ‘wrong think’?

Eternal torture never made sense to me, in any context

I'm pretty sure there's a black mirror episode on this.

"Open your eyes!"

Well that’s black mirror. It’s clearly meant to be disturbing. Doesn’t have to make sense to be messed up.

Things like this tell me Microsoft doesn't care any more about what brought them to make Xbox. Only how they can get as much money out of existing users.

Reminds me of this video about Mature markets.
https://youtu.be/_HJXSt7ofOU

Let's make version of Proton to block all that when playing the games on Linux. It's gonna be hilarious.

More like out of contact with the working class

Right, but specifically what did the person do in that episode? I’m just curious how it was “justified” by whoever was doling it out

I stopped watching black mirror cus it made me feel terrible. Some episodes were pretty good but it’s too heavy for me

On games I’ve purchased? Didn’t read the article.

Edit: downvoted for asking a question. That’s some reddit shit.

Yeah, and there's a reason a lot of us are unlikely to even try them. If I still bought consoles, the first one that did this would be the last I ever bought, and I'm not buying it if it's like that from the start.

I've seen this mechanism a hundred times already, and they want to patent it? Good luck

And yes, it sucks as bad as it sounds

Can we just drop the pretends and go straight to making everyone slaves?

Yeah, it's one of those works of art that aim to make you uneasy. Gotta say, they nailed it. It's a horrible show in more ways than I dare to count.

Here are the relevant episodes where digital minds get tortured.
S2E4 White Christmas: A human mind is copied to a computer that runs home automation systems. The copy is essentially coerced into slavery. When the copy refuses run the automation system perfectly, it is tortured with sensory deprivation over an extended period of time. So, basically slavery, customer satisfaction and quarterly profits are the "justification" here.

S4E1 USS Callister: A guy with some serious issues loves to larp in a digital world with copies of other people. His idea of fun involves abusing the copied minds. It's sort of like mental torture for the copies. He is bullied in real life, and this is his way of getting back to the people he hates. Just plain old revenge transformed into mental abuse, if you can call that a "justification". Hey, I never said the reasons were good.

S4E6 black museum: A museum has a copy of a human mind stuck in a toy. This counts as psychological abuse as the mind is unable to act like a normal human in such a restrictive body. You can also get to electrocute a copy of a murderer's mind, which is just literal torture. Sadistic people pay for it. In other words, money "justifies" torture, again. Actually, money justifies just about anything on this show. On the other hand, they are torturing a convicted murderer so... Oh, but the murderer could be innocent, but we don't really know so... This series just doesn't give you an easy way out.

There are also other episodes that feature copied minds, but they don't involve blatant torture. However, that doesn't make those episodes any less awful, because the writers as sick as they are creative.

Oh dude that jogs my memory, if the USS McAllister episode is the Star Trek esque MMO RPG, I liked that it actually had an optimistic ending

Otherwise yeah those other ones sound rough.

Strangely, some episodes actually have an optimistic ending. Maybe kinda bitter sweet, but still.

Anything even remotely positive suddenly feels very good in this context where the baseline is a total nightmare. When you think a character has hit rock bottom, Black Mirror shows you how things can always get 10x worse. What you thought was bad, was just a warm up lap.

Microsoft makes games?

I would rather read a book

They patented so we can't get games with mechanics like this for two decades, right? They did this to protect us, right? Right? ...

The white Christmas one was a guy who had his mind copied and his copy was being interrogated to get details of the murder he did. Turned out to be a heat-of-the-moment crime-of-passion deal where he truly regrets the murder. They decide to leave his copy running for a few hundred thousand simulated years or something "for a Xmas treat".

Thank you!

yep, the second episode, Fifteen Million Merits, where the MC is forced to watch aggressive sexual ads or pay to skip in order to just exist in his room in peace