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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."
Slimfast and match.com is gonna be appearing on most I bet.
And before anyone claims Sony doesn't do this already, you've already got little promotional boxes and ads after you've booted up and automatically logged into your PSN on your PS3.
Will not buy.
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.
When I want a game console, what I actually want are advertisements! And the Xbox One offers interactive advertisements, no less! Sure, you could just play games to get your fill of interactive content, but why play games when you could watch ads? Who plays games, anyway? Certainly not people who buy the Xbox One; they'll be too busy with ads.
I'd be okay with this on the condition that the kinect interprets the middle finger as a "skip ad" gesture
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.
Only old people use Bing. And only then because likely they confused it with Bingo.
So will I have to run in place for ten seconds to skip a weight loss ad and play my game?
People were not complaining about selling games with the DRM an, they were complaining about not being able to play them.
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Meet Mark Penn http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/15/technology/microsoft-battles-google-by-hiring-political-brawler-mark-penn.html?_r=1& This *cough* shitslinger of joys like scroogled is also in charge of include a blind taste test, Coke-versus-Pepsi style, of search results from Google and Microsoft’s Bing.
Mr. Penn was put in charge of innocently titled “strategic and special projects” its nice that his work bulldozing enemies of the Clintons is now but to work slinging shit at Google.
Ironically this is another article about Bing being shoved down peoples throats in another Duopoly rather than competing on old fashioned things like competition. Perhaps Microsoft Time and Money would be spent serving its hostages.
> How often are people screwed by selling their used games for pennies on the dollar?
Umm its a used item, its not gold or an investment. I want to buy a used game as cheap as I can get it, that's all that matters. I think you're confused on the used marker thingy, its about buying second hand items "cheap" not selling them for 90% of the retail sticker price.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
I am not an avid gamer, but I do occasionally play games. I will never drop $60 on a new game, and I won't go to Gamestop to spend $50 on a used one. What I will do, however is occasionally troll garage sales, and Amazon for interesting looking games. I bought the Force Unleashed I and II for $8 total a few weeks ago. If Microsoft's new system were in place, I never could have done that.
"Never let your sense of morals prevent you from doing what is right" - Salvor Hardin
From the Wikipedia article regarding Steam (my emphasis):
"Steam collects and reports anonymous metrics of its usage, stability, and performance.[53] With the exception of Valve's hardware survey,[54] most collection occurs without notifying the user or offering an opt-out. Some of these metrics are available publicly, such as what games are being played or statistics on player progress in certain games.[55] Valve has also used information from these statistics to justify implementing new features in Steam, such as the addition of a defragmentation option for game caches.[56] Valve announced on July 15, 2010 that in conjunction with collecting hardware information in Steam's opt-in hardware surveys, they would begin collecting a list of the user's installed software as well.[57]"
I don't bad-mouth Steam/Valve--I simply don't do business with them. Never have, never will. I suspect I am not alone in that regard.
Microsoft's Skype, has a backdoor for the NSA to do stuff like live surveillance. This came out in the PRISM/CHESS documents.
So your XBox with its dual Kinect cameras sitting on the TV, and its always-on connections to the Internet could well also have an NSA back door to it, like Skype does.
Also from the Blackhat presentation, Skype is obfuscated code and may contain back doors beyond surveillance of calls, e.g. maybe they can turn mic/camera on remotely:
https://www.blackhat.com/presentations/bh-europe-06/bh-eu-06-biondi/bh-eu-06-biondi-up.pdf
It's all very 1984 telescreen
This model seems to work on Steam and TODAY nobody is bad-mouthing Steam after over a decade of DRM-encumbered operation.
Nobody in US where consumer protection means protecting corporations from users. Germany is suing Valve over steam no resale policy, they did it after landmark case versus Oracle that reinforced right to resale software..
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
They play adverts, they monitor the kinect camera, and they can see which ads have an effect and are watched. XBox is an ads mans wet dream. Never mind that its a customers nightmare.
Also the possibilities for profit are endless:
Suppose you are in the UK and have an XBox with Kinect. NSA can legally spy on Brits, so it buys spy time on XBox Kinects to watch a target. Turns on the camera, gets its surveillance data and hey presto, leverage. Maybe a politicians family is in, the son is smoking pot, that's paydirt and you as customer brought the surveillance camera into your own home and wired it up yourself and even pay for the connection to the NSA!
Would Microsoft sell them access? Well it provided live Skype taps, message+voice+video taps on Skype. And Skype must have some business model we can't see to justify its $7 billion price. So yeh, damn right!
Yup. MS said so themselves.
Xbox One built for ads from the ground up
I usually use a site as a landing page and reflexively go to my intended site (email, calendar, etc) from there, or I'm on some other site with links out. Sometimes, as soon as I click a link to where I want to go, I notice an ad on the originating page for something I actually might be interested in. But when I go back to that page, I rarely can get a repeat performance of the original ad; surprisingly I seem to get a cycle of the about a half dozen others, but rarely including the first. There should be some way to force an affinity between ads and the back button. After all, I'm not likely to bounce on the refresh button just to see what different ads come up, but it is possible that I might use the back button to get back to something I was interested in.
Some see the vessel as half full; others see it as half-empty; We pour it out on the floor and laugh
Slimfast and match.com is gonna be appearing on most I bet.
Don't forget about the possibility of ads from local chiropractors!
It can play the moment you put your back out.
"Hi, this is Kinect Bob. I see you are screaming in agony and prone on the floor, would you like me to contact Dr. Friendly for you? Twitch to the left for YES".
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Do we really need Soviet Russia anymore? I was under the impression we already surpassed them by leaps and bounds when it comes to domestic spying and keeping the population under control.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Apparently it needs to be connected for hte xbox to work. But can't you just put a sock over it? Congrats MS.. you get a first hand look at what the inside of my sock looks like... 24/7.
The Orwellian parallel is the TVs in 1984 which couldn't be turned off and could spy on you. People in the book used to put curtains over the TVs when they weren't using them. But they couldn't turn them off. They'd just sit there all day and all night... and you had to put a curtain over them if you wanted any sleep. Do the same with this stupid connect device. Put a sock over it.
Or do the really bright thing and don't buy it. MS is not providing what the consumer wants. This is not an honest product.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
I have no problem with Steam. They actually seem to realize that digital delivery means the customer can save money. When I'm buying fairly recent games for 60% off or whatever, I don't really care if I can't resell them. Steam makes purchasing and playing games pretty cheap and easy, so I like it.
Origin, is another story. Steam works precisely because it's publisher-agnostic. Origin will never gain that momentum because EA is just using it as a way to increase profits by cutting out the costs of physical distribution, without passing any savings to the customer.
Knowing how the kinect works with digit interpretation now, it would probably just be mistaken for the "buy one" gesture.
What?!? It's not a bug, it's a feature!
Science advances one funeral at a time- Max Planck
Fine, in Fascist America, Bing searches you!
FTFY
Help I am stuck in a signature factory!
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.