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Microsoft Integrating Xbox One Advertising With Kinect To Profile Users For Ads
MojoKid writes "When Microsoft reversed its Xbox One DRM policies a few weeks back, there was momentary hope that the company has listened to its customers and understood the features they were asking for. Granted, this was brief. However, with Mattrick gone, there was some hope that maybe the company would reintroduce plans like Family Sharing and put the console back on track. Apparently not. Microsoft's big new feature with Kinect? Advertising. Microsoft plans to use Kinect to make advertisements even more engaging than their current counterparts. In the future, Kinect may offer you a 'Choose Your Own Adventure' style narrative in which you speak commands or give orders to an ad as it's playing to change the final outcome. The other way Microsoft wants to use Kinect is to monitor what's going on in the living room to serve you group-appropriate content, rather than resorting to the plain old method of bombarding you with non-interactive advertising for things you don't care about. Microsoft will likely learn that telling gamers that the Xbox One is an ad-centric experience and attempting to spin it like a positive doesn't actually work."
Wow, I actually want the new xbox less than I want a Wii U now...
Why are there even ads on the Xbox? After all you've:
A) Bought the console
B) Bought some games (presumably)
C) Quite possibly bought a gold membership
Now, I can understand something like when you go to the store to have maybe a little promo of "what's new" but beyond that, ads are unacceptable.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
I'll say it again:
The primary purpose of the XBox One is to be a platform for selling ads. On the one hand, publishers no longer need to solicit for static advertising in games, now they can have Microsoft be the entire advertising platform. It's like embedding a Google ad on your blog and collecting the revenue, only now on a HUGE scale. On the other hand, no longer do advertisers need to pay a ton for static ads on pre-releae titles, hoping that the ad retains enough relevance to be beneficial to their business. Publishers win, Microsoft wins, and advertisers win. Welcome to the future!
Kinect is all about generating advertising hints. It just is. There's no other sane reason why it supposedly cannot be turned off. It's there to collect hints on your environment, feed them to the Bing ad platform, and generate in-game ads as a result.
The always-on, regularly dial-home connectivity scheme was all about exchanging advertising hints for ads. Microsoft can capture advertisers by guaranteeing nearly real-time freshness of their advertising.
And lastly, the "co-process in the cloud" is all about advertising. Polygons aren't going to be rendered in the cloud, ad textures are. Turn that off and I bet there will be a lot of empty textures in just about every XB1 game that comes out, from AAA titles to $5 throw-aways.
Microsoft is selling you to the advertisers. It's just as simple as that.
and TODAY nobody is bad-mouthing Steam after over a decade of DRM-encumbered operation.
I am. Plenty of other people still do. So, you're wrong.
Will not buy.
Neither will I.
If there are advertisements, then the hardware and games should be free. If the user is paying for the hardware and games, there should be no advertisements.
I have this distant hope that gamers will learn the lesson taught to us by cable TV. Originally cable TV was ad-free on the basis that you were paying a fee for it. Then ads were introduced and for some reason, viewers tolerated it. They grabbed their ankles and took it just like they typically do, so cable TV ads became firmly entrenched.
Gamers, the same thing will happen to you if you put up with this. There can be no doubt about it.
It is a miracle that curiosity survives formal education. - Einstein
I'd be OK with it if Microsoft was giving them away. Charging advertisers to put ads in front of users and then making users pay for the Xbox so that they can be pummelled with ads seems, somehow, really fucking greedy.