Microsoft Files Patent for Displaying Personalized Ads in Games (pcmag.com) 52
Microsoft filed a patent describing a system that would serve personalized ad content to gamers as they play. From a report: The patent was first spotted by Gamesual, and is titled, "Providing personalized content for unintrusive online gaming experience." It describes a system whereby ads can be served to cloud-based streaming or internet-connected games, but those ads are personalized for each player. The diagrams included with the patent show personalized ads being applied to billboards in a driving game, the hoarding behind a goal in a soccer game, and branding on outfits in sports games.
The ads would be served in real-time, appearing at locations deemed "continuously visible," and based on who is playing, which can be determined by checking the account used to access the game. Although the patent states this would be an "unintrusive" system of serving ads, it would inevitably lead to developers being asked to ensure a minimum number of locations where ads can be placed and easily seen. Environment designs will be impacted, and we could see ads appearing on objects players regularly interact with much more often.
The ads would be served in real-time, appearing at locations deemed "continuously visible," and based on who is playing, which can be determined by checking the account used to access the game. Although the patent states this would be an "unintrusive" system of serving ads, it would inevitably lead to developers being asked to ensure a minimum number of locations where ads can be placed and easily seen. Environment designs will be impacted, and we could see ads appearing on objects players regularly interact with much more often.
Great, more crap from MS (Score:3, Funny)
As if they were not already a world market leader in that discipline...
Relax (Score:3)
In game advertising has been tried and outside of sports games (where it's part of the presentation) it's a waste. The game company spends more time & money tracking down advertisers than it's worth while pissing off gamers and adding a lot of extra work to the development cycle.
Remember if you're doing adverts you suddenly have to worry about brand s
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Remember the three basic requirements of a patent: Utility, Originality and Non-Obviousness. "Non-obvious" means that it is something that someone knowledgeable in the field couldn't come up with in just a few minutes of thinking about it. This really seems to fail the non-obvious test to me.
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Non-obvious? How about utility? Or originality?
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Utility it's got; it'll make ad money for the game designer, so it's useful. Originality, maybe. People have done in-game ads before, but you might be able to slide by on the fact that it's personalized. It's nonobviousness that's the real gotcha here.
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That was the old style of patent. These days anything sticks and the US patent office doesn't bother verifying anything unless and until someone sues.
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Not only is it obvious, assets that do exactly what they are talking about have been on the Unity asset store for a long time. It takes all of 5 seconds to find ready-to-go ad systems for in-game ads, this is just the first three I saw:
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/3d/bidstack-in-game-advertising-serving-player-experiences-on-mobil-233179 [unity.com]
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/utilities/frameplay-sdk-152964 [unity.com]
https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/add-ons/anzu-programmatic-in-game-pc-console- [unity.com]
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Surely it couldn't be all of the $10,000.00 to file, rubber-stamped, and heavily litigated patents on ideas, nature, or fucking artwork that forbid anyone from working on something similar for 20 years.
Nope definitely couldn't be the number of low wage jobs that also demand an ownership stake, 60/40 if you're lucky, in anything you do off-the-clock and not related to your field of work. (For the privilege of getting
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Hmm. Good point.
LIARS! As per normal (Score:5, Insightful)
Providing personalized content for unintrusive online gaming experience
There is no such thing as unintrusive ad. That defeats the purpose of them.
Re:LIARS! As per normal (Score:5, Funny)
Leela: Didn't you have ads in the 20th century?
Fry: Well, sure, but not in our dreams. Only on TV and radio. And in magazines and movies and at ball games, on buses and milk cartons and T-shirts and bananas and written on the sky. But not in dreams. No, sir-ee!
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There is no such thing as unintrusive ad. That defeats the purpose of them.
There's a difference between being visible, and being in your way. For example the Red Bull advertising in Wipeout XL was more atmospheric than offensive. Though it may have helped that at the time, you couldn't actually get Red Bull anywhere in the US (or at least I had never seen it.) I had no idea what it even was, to me it might as well have been made up.
A lot of ads are also just intended to build familiarity with a brand, so the goal is to be the opposite of intrusive — you want the presentation
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Providing personalized content for unintrusive online gaming experience
There is no such thing as unintrusive ad. That defeats the purpose of them.
Hence why this getting patented is a good thing. It makes targeted advertisement even more expensive. Not that targetted advertisement is very good in my experience, they're either advertising a product I've already bought (*cough* Amazon *cough*) or it's crap I've no interest in (*cough* Google, you practically have my entire life on file and haven't figured out what I like yet *cough*).
You've also got the disconnect between advertiser and product (by this I mean eyeballs and ears... erm... I mean us).
Oh, yes please Microsoft! (Score:1)
enforce this patent, do not allow anyone to serve ads in games!
Re: Oh, yes please Microsoft! (Score:2)
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Hooray! (Score:2)
Hooray! More ads! Ads saturating more of what we see in everyday life! More incentive to intrusively mine any bit of data that anybody can find on us to build as complete a profile as possible that will assuredly never be misused, no, definitely not! This is what all of us have been wanting!
single player games must be online at all times to (Score:2)
single player games must be online at all times to play??
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Welcome to the future. Where the software makes the hardware cry.
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They could obviously cache ads.
Some games require you to be online to play for no good reason, some don't. That's why we read reviews
Re: single player games must be online at all time (Score:3)
online all the time and online from time to time (Score:2)
online all the time and online from time to time are not the same and say just needing an basic dial up level of bandwidth to check key's vs needing to bandwidth to load ad data all the time as not the same as well.
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And that's why I stopped buying versions of Civilization. (Well, one of the reasons...but not a minor component of the decision.)
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Civ usually works and don't require you to be online to use DLC. But the devs are generally incompetent, this last big patch was a big botch.
sweet (Score:1)
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What would be more fun about seeing real ads?
Re: sweet (Score:2)
The nice thing about patents (Score:2)
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Now we don't have to worry about ads in video games for the next 20 years.
No, you don't need to worry about rotating, "personalized" (meaning targeted, meaning based on user tracking) ads in video games by other studios for 20 years.
Ads in video games are already here. One of the most egregious examples I can think of has to be Final Fantasy XV. It's a fantasy game, it's in the title. (Of course, so is "final," and it's the fifteenth one.) It's set in a fantasy, non-Earth world, where the fantasy kingdom has technology roughly on par with the "real world," just in some cases powe
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One of the most egregious examples I can think of has to be Final Fantasy XV. It's a fantasy game, it's in the title. (Of course, so is "final," and it's the fifteenth one.)
The "final" is supposed to refer to how wonderful every FF game is supposed to be, like each one is the best RPG ever or something. The Fantasy has literally always been overblown, the first airship appeared in the original game. Frankly though I still think VII was the peak, I couldn't get into any of the later titles.
"You play like a noob!" (Score:3)
Here are the best 3 recommended gameplay improvement courses for you.
Re:stuff that already existed cant be patented aga (Score:4)
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Seems way to obvious. I thought of this back in 2009. Nothing innovative about it at all.
Great! (Score:3)
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Yet another ad-blocker to install.
I think it's only a matter of time before someone starts selling physical in-line ad blockers that people can install at home. Advertisers only have themselves to blame.
However that is besides the point, I sense that this patent is mainly aimed at your console peasant as the Glorious PCGMR can block ads at the OS level. This is aimed at Generic Sports Franchise $YEAR, rather than games that gamers enjoy.
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I suppose a Pi-Hole is the closest thing to your description right now.
Nope. An ad-blocking proxy is the closest thing; in fact, it is the thing. However, most of them only affect http[s]. That still might work though, since it's common now to use http for all kinds of data transfers by applications, albeit usually with xml or json for organization instead of html.
Face it, advertising powers the internet (Score:2)
Without advertising there would be no internet as we know and hate it. We'd still be using Usenet and BBS's. Now, I happen to think that would be a good thing, but what would you do without your Twitter and TikTok? No Facebook? No PornHub?
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We have had advertising in the past. Broadcast television survived and thrived this way, creating a full industry. The same is true for radio. However there's a big difference. Advertisements today are amazingly intrusive, personalized (ie, creepy), ubiquitous, and over the top. Advertisements in the past were almost always curated - you never got ads for dildos while watching Leave it to Beaver, unlike on the web where you'll see a Chrysler ad on a cycling forum. It cost real money to put an ad up on
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but what would you do without your Twitter and TikTok? No Facebook? No PornHub?
Answer: The same thing I do every day.... avoid social media. I was online before 2000. Every social media site going belly up? "And nothing of value was lost."
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Frankly, I probably wouldn't notice.
My only fear is that the IQ on the pages I frequent would drop even more because so far these antisocial media sites pretty much contain that problem.
As a Playstation Owner (Score:2)
It's going to be part of the game. (Score:1)
Just like you would see a billboard for a fake ad in the game, as part of the environment and world, they're just going to replace it with real advertisements.
That's how they're calling it unintrusive. It's like a bus goes by and usually has an ad banner on it, but in this case, it will be a real world ad.
Same idea as product placement really, they're just dynamically going to do ads. Depending on their effectiveness, then we might see them be brighter and more annoying like real ads.
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That may be cool for games like Cyberpunk where ads are part of the experience. But you think they'd stop at that?
How long 'til the next Morrowind reminds you to drink the right soda and get the right insurance?
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Yeah that's what I ment by brighter and more annoying ads like real ads.
At first they'll design the games to have it fit, to slowly introduce it, eventually it'll grow. It'll start off as part of the ads for a new casting say in like starcraft 2, part of a cinematic, anywhere with sci-fi will be it's first target. But sooner or later, the cutscene will change slowly, so that you realize it's not really a story driven cutscene, but that between levels you're getting a full on commercial that they're pretendi
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Ah yes, the return of the unskipable cutscene that was all the rage back in the 90s and early 2000s. Everyone loved them. Only this time it's with extra annoyance because not only is it tedious to watch the same cutscene for the n-th time, it's also something that seems to be meant to piss you off.