A patent application dated September 3, and seemingly first spotted by the gaming blog Respawn First paints a picture of future gaming that feels a little like the old “insert coin” arcade model. But instead of inserting a coin to continue, Microsoft would insert an advertisement. Into the player’s brain.
But—to be absolutely clear—the proposed invention theoretically allows this ad-view-as-transaction event to occur at some of the least irksome possible moments. Rather than, say, in the middle of a boss fight, Microsoft’s system would interact with the game engine so that it could serve “promoted content” roughly at set intervals, but only when a “promoted content trigger event” has signaled to the system that it’s a good time for an interruption.
The game itself would broadcast that the user was at one of the relevant events—a cutscene just ended, a goal was just reached, there’s a loading screen here, that sort of thing. Once the system receives that signal from the game, it’s capable of “suspending a user’s interaction with the interactive software application based on the promoted content trigger event”—freezing the game so it can show you an ad, in other words.
After it un-freezes the game, its next job is, “Establishing a credit based at least partially on the audiovisual promoted content.” So you get credit to continue playing, having “paid,” if you will, with your ad view.
Could this really be in the player’s best interest? Maybe sort of! For instance, in July, Xbox announced that it was testing an ad-supported game-streaming process. Users with outdated devices who own newer games they theoretically shouldn’t be able to play without a paid subscription to a cloud gaming service can stream them for free for an hour after watching an ad.
So in theory, something like the tech described in this patent could potentially allow users to play for free for longer periods of time on outdated consoles. If the ads really are relatively unobtrusive, that might not be so horrible.
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