Slashdot Mirror
The Ugly, Profitable Details About Xbox Live Advertising
An anonymous reader writes "In an editorial at Penny Arcade, Ben Kuchera writes about how Microsoft's subscription-based Xbox Live platform has become an advertising cash cow — to the detriment of users who already pay for the service. Quoting: 'People who don't play video games would be forgiven if they turned on an Xbox 360 and didn't realize it was a device used to primarily play games. The first screen you see on the Xbox 360 Dashboard is often a mixture of ads for all sorts of goods and services, and many times games are in the minority of ad slots. The latest redesign increased the ad space that can be sold to advertisers, and that in turn increased this problem. Let's be clear, it is a problem. Game discovery is terrible in the current design of Xbox Live, and the usability of a system that used to be about games is suffering in order for Microsoft to make money on ads. Sadly, this issue isn't going away: Ad sales simply bring in too much money to ignore, and revenue is growing. ... I contacted Microsoft and asked how much advertising revenue impacted the profitability of the Xbox 360. "We don't share this information publicly but we can tell you that, since 2010, the advertising business has grown 142%," I was told.'"
I didn't own an original XBox, so I don't have a frame of reference but I've noticed that since I bought my 360 in 2008 most updates to the Dashboard have been working hard at making it more difficult to find my games or my home media.
In fact, with the latest batches of updates (Metro-like?) I've found it very difficult to get to games I want to play in my library, to the point now that I forego the GUI and go straight to the "quick play" option (which is basically just an alphabetically sorted list). And browsing my home network has been completely removed in lieu of streaming (yuck, no thanks).
I think Microsoft could learn a thing or two from Valve, Steam is pretty easy to use but is also a ad delivery system, I can find everything rather easily in Steam and I find it a lot less annoying than the 360 Dashboard, also Steam has sales for games that don't suck, and that makes me want to spend money but hey, that's just my opinion...
crazy dynamite monkey
What makes it even more annoying is that there were *2* primary reasons for the Xbox Dash redesign:
1) make it 100% Kinect-accessible
2) promote content more (much of it paid) and increase advertising space
So, they changed the fairly decent previous Xbox Dashboard to something designed around products I don't want to see and a UI navigation mechanism I don't want to use. For the vast majority of users out there who just want to use a controller to play a game or watch a movie, it's a major step backwards in usability.