Tom's Hardware and Respawn First recently reported on a fun new patent from those wiz kids at Microsoft, one that would dynamically pause your game to show you advertisements. Here are the big wham lines from the abstract of US 202610260258 A1, "Contextually Aware Management of Interactive Software Application Access:"
- "A content management system may suspend a user's interaction with the interactive software application based on the promoted content trigger event." (Emphasis mine)
- "A content management system may present the promoted audiovisual content to the user."
- "A content management system may establish a credit … the credit delays suspension of the user's interaction."
That's the sort of whimsical creativity that made me fall in love with games in the first place. In plain English: This is a system for showing advertisements during gameplay, one that pauses your game (suspends your interaction). Similar to ad-supported mobile games, Microsoft proposes a credit system where these tokens can be exchanged for more ad-free game time.
Microsoft explains that videogames do not lend themselves to regular commercial breaks in the same way as TV shows, necessitating a partially user-controlled, credit-based system for managing advertisement delivery. The other half of the equation: Having it monitor gameplay and avoid deploying ads during climactic or lean-forward moments. How thoughtful.
My bias is I would rather only play games made before 2005 on a primordial ThinkPad for the rest of my life than deal with whatever the hell is going on here.
This sounds, quite frankly, god-awful. One of the worst case scenario arguments against always-online consoles and subscription-based gaming outlined in a patent. I'm not sure there is a game good enough, or an ad-supported Game Pass package cheap enough, that would make me subject myself to this. Forget the inconvenience—the indignity of it all is enough to drive you to the brink.
The silver lining, if you're still rooting for Xbox—it still holds some of my favorite studios hostage—is that patents are not always put into practice. Seventeen years ago, Sony signaled intent to have us all stand up and shout "McDonalds" to make a vision of a burger go away, and that never happened.
The popular outrage against the patent may already be giving the planners at Microsoft pause. On the other hand: Xbox's CSO Matthew Ball is still a big believer in in-game ads. Meanwhile, The ailing titan EA has already rolled out EA Advertising, a new platform for "in-game integrations, creative partnerships, and scalable advertising capabilities." I love scalable advertising capabilities.
