Watching an ad would earn players another block of ad-free play time, called a “credit”
Well I guess it’s good they patented it, at least that means the others can’t do it.
I question why they would give their own games such a disadvantage, but whatever
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.
Please drink verification can.
15 years ago and accurate as fuck
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.
And retro games to emulate.
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.
So many games on sale I want to play, backlog infinite
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
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.
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).
Football manager have always had “let’s kick racism out of football” and other NGOs represented on their banners - Because they had no clue what to do with it, I’m pretty sure there’s a settings option to replace them with real paid ads now
Indies have been far more satisfying for me over the last five years or so; many wonderful gems out there.
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.
Indie games are booming lately, if you think you’re witnessing the fall of gaming you’re simply looking in the wrong place.
Both can be true
and those indie companies will get bigger, become corporatized, and continue the cycle.
Just like the ones before them did, just like the ones after them will.
The good thing is that creating a game is a task a person or a small team can accomplish even with non-AAA money, and there are many people out there who want to create something. So even if some of those indies become corrupted, there will always be more people out there who want to build their vision.
And tbh, if from this moment on only crap came out, we already have decades of great games to play - i for my part would never run out of games until the day i die even if i stopped adding stuff to my library - i am sitting on ca. 37000 titles at the moment. If the average time to complete is around 20 hours, that’s around 83 years of continuous gaming, much more than my estimated remaining lifetime.
yeah, anyone can make a game. that game will probably be a slop generic asset flip game, but still technically a game.
to make a good game takes years, and money, and either knowledge or time available to be spent pursuing that knowledge…while also working an actual job to actually pay for all the bills for everyday life, in addition to what the game needs.
Yes. That’s how art works.
Most musicians, including many bands that fill stadiums and go on world tours, pay the bills with regular full-time jobs and do all of their band stuff in their spare time. It’s similar for artists, authors, etc.
A really good game takes years of hard work. It can take surprisingly little money; a small team driven by passion can be very efficient. But it does take effort. And sure, not everyone can be Tynan Sylvester or ConcernedApe or Pixel or Team Cherry; most tiny indie games aren’t genre-shaping mega hits.
But they don’t have to. There’s plenty of small games out there that are just good and that’s good enough. The idea of even just a hundred people playing one’s game and being entertained is enticing enough for thousands of developers to sink hours and hours of their spare time into.
Will there be a bazillion lame asset flips in the future? Yes, just like there have always been lame derivative bands, shitty overhyped artists, terrible indie movies, and drivel-slinging hack authors.
Just like there have always been shitty AA and AAA games, for that matter. 90% of everything is crap. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of gems hiding in between all the chaff.
(And while I’m at it: While making a game does requires a lot of knowledge, that knowledge can be acquired along the way. The original Cave Story was a one-man project and Pixel certainly didn’t start out as a professional programmer/artist/composer/screenplay author. Learning how to do all that is part of the fun for some people.)
Just like there have always been shitty AA and AAA games, for that matter. 90% of everything is crap. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t a lot of gems hiding in between all the chaff.
Just wanted to add: and by the power of the incredible force called “taste”, in many cases one mans trash is another ones treasure.
Maybe your standards are too high? Most indie games I’ve played lately have been very good: Librarian, The Artisan of Glimmith, and Kabuto Park were the most recent 3
See Dave the Diver for a corporate game people assume is indie because of its style
Bury your hobby with that attitude. There are and there always has been studios that decide intentionally to keep their projects small in scope.
Wealth doesn’t trickle down, but losses do. Sadly, AAA studios collapsing will affect indies’ abilities to get funding , so expect to feel some pain there too.
This is already being felt these last few years as many gaming publishers shifted to funding AI.
I think it’s just the fall of the industry as we know it. I don’t think gaming is going away anytime soon. But I do think we are about to see a very different industry in a few years. It probably won’t look like it ever really has before. A massive indie space, with sparse few AAA titles.
Capitalism knows no sentimentality.
Microsoft != gaming.
That’s mobile games basically
Why does this feel more relavent suddenly
Its relevance increases every year. Truly it was prophetic.
DRINK VERIFICATION CAN!
ROFL Oh hell no, that would get me to never buy a game with this feature enabled. I would wait and figure out if said feature were present.
It’s your 30th boss run. As you fuck up your sixth dodge roll in a row, the Troll picks up your character. He roars over the screams of your avatar as he crushes it’s ribs in its massive fist.
Then, as he raises you high over head, and opens wide to chomp down on your head, the actions stops. The Troll turns to the camera and smiles, showing off brilliant pearly whites. “Colgate is recommended by 9/10 dentists.”, the troll effuses over the screaming.
A text box appears.
‘To proceed, type the number of dentists Colgate is recommended by, followed by this random number “N”.’
I mean, if it just stopped at the troll saying “…9/10 dentists…” That would be pretty fucking funny
I was going to add that the avatar was already dead, and it was your screaming the troll was talking over, because this is the 30th time you’d heard the ad
i think a popup will just show in the middle of the fight obscuring everything. “you have alloted 30minutes of boss battle, please watch ads to continue”
Oh good. I was only 98% sure I was done buying consoles forever. It’s good to really know.
I might make exceptions for consoles/devices that run linux off the shelf. (I want to get a steam frame, ok?)
The patent seems to be for PC games though I’m sure it would apply to both.
Microsoft don’t have a distribution platform for PC games, even when they did no one used it. So they will only be able to introduce this in games that they are the publisher for, which is actually not that many games.
I’m very sure steam already prohibits in-game advertising. So Microsoft would have to distribute these games themselves and the moment that any publisher decides to go their own route they immediately decrease their revenue, even if nothing else has changed.
Don’t forget they bought Activision and own games like Diablo and WoW.
Just get an emulation handheld. With Steam offering ARM support through a translation layer, a strong one can even run a surprising array of PC games these days. My Retroid Pocket Flip 2 isn’t even that nice as far as these things go, and it plays just about any 2D game I’ve tried and a lot of 3D from the '00s and early '10s, later if they don’t press limits. You can also attach them to TVs and use normal controllers, including multiplayer.
Get? Use an old phone
Most people would count Black mirror as a dystopian science fiction nightmare. Microslop on the other hand saw “15 million credits” and pitched it to their shareholders.
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.
That one black mirror episode where you had limited credits to skip ads and the forced you to keep your eyes open to watch the unskippable ad if you didn’t have the credits. Enough said.
Seriously, what the hell are they thinking? Did they not come up with anything better? Oh well, now we definitely know we’re living in a dystopia at least.
🎶You load sixteen tons, what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt Saint Peter don’t you call me, 'cause I can’t go I owe my soul to the company store🎶
What’s amazing is they are proposing to introduce such a scheme in the product that people aren’t forced to use.
I just won’t play those games. End of problem.
Then they do it on the OS, forcing people to swap to Linux - But the majority of users wouldn’t know how
Until 95% of games have this, and you won’t have a choice.
THIS is what the new head of gaming came up with to save xbox? Lol.
lands the final hit against Margit in Elden Ring
“Tarnished… Have you heard about Burger King’s new Loaded Jalepeno Whopper? Now only $6.99.”
6.99 what is this 2015?
W H O P P E N H E I M E R
