Amid renewed rumours of an ad supported tier for Xbox Game Pass, a newly spotted Microsoft patent describes putting ad breaks into the games themselves.
There has long been talk of Microsoft implementing a cheaper tier of Xbox Game Pass that features adverts and that only seems more inevitable now that the company is offering free cloud streaming with ads.
The way it works is that the ads play before you start streaming your games, which isn’t ideal but a better alternative to having the ads play during your play sessions.
You might think such an idea would be too awful and unpopular for even Microsoft to attempt, but a recently discovered patent proves that the company is certainly considering it. The patent was filed in April and only published earlier this month, on the website for the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), so you can freely look at it for yourself here.
It was spotted and shared by Respawn First over the weekend and while it uses a lot of jargon, the main takeaway is that if implemented, this ‘Contextually Aware Management of Interactive Software Application Access’ would make it so your games momentarily pause and make you watch an advert.
That’s not to say that your game would pause randomly whenever the system feels like shoving an ad in your face. The patent states that the system would only do this in certain situations:
‘For example, the credit may have a credit duration defined at least partially by progression or events in the interactive software application, such as five rounds of gameplay, completing one level of a video game, completing three online multiplayer matches, defeating a particular non-playable character (NPC), or completing a project or task within the interactive software application.’
What this means is that the system would try to avoid splicing in an ad at random, and instead try and wait for a pause in gameplay or a milestone achievement in the game. So, there wouldn’t be any nightmare scenarios of having an ad interrupt you in the middle of a boss fight. In theory anyway.
It sounds very similar to how ads work in free-to-play mobile games, where the ads only play in-between levels after a certain amount of time has passed. That’s fair enough in something you haven’t paid for but there’d be rioting on the streets if Xbox tried it with something you spent £70 on.
Game Pass is an awkward grey area though, in that technically you haven’t paid for the game itself, just access to the service as a whole. But even so, adding ads in the middle of gameplay for Game Pass titles is going to be very contentious.
Not that Microsoft is incapable of making awful decisions that seem purposefully aimed at upsetting its audience. It’s still in the process of laying off hundreds of Xbox employees and it has bumped up the price of both the Xbox Series X/S and its cloud streaming service.
It’s also rumoured the ad supported Game Pass tier won’t include day one Xbox games either, which Microsoft notably didn’t deny when questioned about it.
Despite all this penny pinching, Microsoft is more than happy to foot the bill of two Hideo Kojima projects – OD and Physint – which both have star studded casts that can’t have come cheap.
Full story HERE
There has long been talk of Microsoft implementing a cheaper tier of Xbox Game Pass that features adverts and that only seems more inevitable now that the company is offering free cloud streaming with ads.
The way it works is that the ads play before you start streaming your games, which isn’t ideal but a better alternative to having the ads play during your play sessions.
You might think such an idea would be too awful and unpopular for even Microsoft to attempt, but a recently discovered patent proves that the company is certainly considering it. The patent was filed in April and only published earlier this month, on the website for the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), so you can freely look at it for yourself here.
It was spotted and shared by Respawn First over the weekend and while it uses a lot of jargon, the main takeaway is that if implemented, this ‘Contextually Aware Management of Interactive Software Application Access’ would make it so your games momentarily pause and make you watch an advert.
That’s not to say that your game would pause randomly whenever the system feels like shoving an ad in your face. The patent states that the system would only do this in certain situations:
‘For example, the credit may have a credit duration defined at least partially by progression or events in the interactive software application, such as five rounds of gameplay, completing one level of a video game, completing three online multiplayer matches, defeating a particular non-playable character (NPC), or completing a project or task within the interactive software application.’
What this means is that the system would try to avoid splicing in an ad at random, and instead try and wait for a pause in gameplay or a milestone achievement in the game. So, there wouldn’t be any nightmare scenarios of having an ad interrupt you in the middle of a boss fight. In theory anyway.
It sounds very similar to how ads work in free-to-play mobile games, where the ads only play in-between levels after a certain amount of time has passed. That’s fair enough in something you haven’t paid for but there’d be rioting on the streets if Xbox tried it with something you spent £70 on.
Game Pass is an awkward grey area though, in that technically you haven’t paid for the game itself, just access to the service as a whole. But even so, adding ads in the middle of gameplay for Game Pass titles is going to be very contentious.
Not that Microsoft is incapable of making awful decisions that seem purposefully aimed at upsetting its audience. It’s still in the process of laying off hundreds of Xbox employees and it has bumped up the price of both the Xbox Series X/S and its cloud streaming service.
It’s also rumoured the ad supported Game Pass tier won’t include day one Xbox games either, which Microsoft notably didn’t deny when questioned about it.
Despite all this penny pinching, Microsoft is more than happy to foot the bill of two Hideo Kojima projects – OD and Physint – which both have star studded casts that can’t have come cheap.
Full story HERE