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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
Watching an ad would earn players another block of ad-free play time, called a “credit”
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.
Capitalism knows no sentimentality.
Why does this feel more relavent suddenly
DRINK VERIFICATION CAN!
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.
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.
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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 …
THIS is what the new head of gaming came up with to save xbox? Lol.
Is this an ad for Steam? /s
This is an ad for magnet links.
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
“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.
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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.
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.
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
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.
