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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."
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.
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
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
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
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.