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Nah, they got Call of Duty now. The casual gamers that keep Madden and that shit alive will make sure this stuff succeeds.
We are talking about the same gamers that willingly bought Call of Dutys PREMIUM battlepass so much that they are looking at a 3 tier battle pass system now lol.
Maybe, but at the same time, the guy that bought cod only did it for the instantenous rush of adrenaline they get playing that game, and that wont be the same if the game stops for a ad every 5 minutes
I'm finally looking at switching after 30 years of Windows. As soon as this Mint install finishes on an old media laptop and I can test that my required programs work I'll be free from their enshitified clutches for good.
Microsoft's bullshit persuaded me to switch to Linux. My main rig has been running Fedora_KDE for about a year now. It's similar enough to Windows that I haven't missed it at all, and as bonus points I don't have to deal with any bloat or forced decision-making.
We laughed our asses off when it first aired' My wife, best friends and I were all in the same WoW guild together and we played way more than we should have. I know that I used to spend more hours playing a week than I did my full time job.
On the bright side, Sony has a patent where people have to stand up and say the name of the product on the Ad. So just because it's patented doesn't mean it'll happen.
Can’t be a documentary. The world elected the smartest man on the planet as their president, and when he discovered someone smarter he took him seriously and implemented his ideas.
Idiocracy is not a documentary, as they have a more positive future to look forward to.
This is far from MS first ad related patent, nor will it be the last.
Just look up all the stuff Sony, EA, or Xbox have filed the past 2 decades, and be glad none of is used. More so than not, it's more of a "just in case" filing to prevent others from using it
Literally how I feel with any subscription service and their ads. They start at 30 seconds, then 120, then 150, then 240 four consecutive times... show is only 30 mins long.
It's already against Steam's storefront policy to implement ad-based revenue generation for anything that isn't a promotional event within a game. This ads-for-playtime thing would never be permitted.
And people still dislike steam? Imagine if Sony or microslop ran that. It would be past garbage by now. With AI garbage. And every update would break half the games.
They're always pissed we choose steam and try to guilt us with how it is unfair for the poor publisher's profit... sorry "devs" despite indie devs without publishers having blown up in popularity almost exclusively because of Steam.
Indie and smaller devs are crushing the supposed "AAA/AAAA" clowns that think they get to decide if players like hyper aggressive monetization strategies or not. They are also making way better games because they make games to be fun, not trap players in dark pattern BS and artificially making the game worse to force them to use the store.
Oh, looking at Steam, it's easy to see how they could completely screw us over. They're a monopoly the same way Amazon, Google, or Netflix were. Trusted because they're the best.
Any venture capital or a different set of board members and they'll forget that the business model works because they're mostly ethical. Then we'll be back to getting copies of games from whatever source we can, sorting them manually, and talking about games on 3rd party sites.
The patent as described in the article would have to be implemented in the game engine. So the game developer would have to just not activate that feature. If they do, they violate Steam TOS.
We've reached the inflexion point of game innovation
There's nothing more they can do to compete with each other so it's just about putting a price tag on every single thing they can to bleed gamers dry
Dynamic pricing, micro transactions, season passes, now ads on a console you own and a game you clicked "buy" telling you it's a game you should own but fine print says fuck yourself
This isn't game-only 'innovation', it's just capitalism, full stop. It happens in pretty much every industry.
First and easiest is the productive growth: better products, lower prices to expand market share, remove barriers to entry and add accessibility to expand the market audience, consolidate market share through mergers/acquisitions, automate processes and pipelines for efficiency...
And when you reach the limits of productive growth, you switch gears to reductive growth. Skimp on materials, fire people, reduce support quality, remove costly features, fire more people, pay people less, cut down on R&D instead just iterating on existing models. Lobby regulators to remove or relax regulations that prevent further cost savings at the expense of the public. Expand market share by driving competitors out of business.
Then there's rent-seeking. Extract additional value from the captive market share. Monetize any possible aspects of the product or service that previously hadn't been. Convert purchases to recurring subscriptions. Eat away at the base offering, converting more and more of it into subscription or purchase. Attack the concept of ownership.
Then abstractions: Diversify. Invade tangentially-related industries where the previous steps of capitalist growth haven't been optimized into oblivion. Bundle offerings together to claw out market share. Attach to public funding, seeking grants for semi-related objectives already being met for profit. And worse. Prey on gambling vulnerabilities and addictions. Teams of psychologists are hired explicitly to lock in living, breathing wallet-banks.
It's the 'blood out of a stone' playbook and it happens predictably in any industry where companies seek to deliver not just a steady profit for shareholders, but a reliably growing profit, for a return on the investment. Infinite growth.
Yeah, this is the exact thing that is happening in basically every industry. These people will burn a company to the ground to gain pennies now rather than orders of magnitude more profit in a year. They literally don't think about anything but "this quarter".
It's late stage capitalism and these people are basically a death cult.
Yup, a reliable business that produces one trillion dollars of profit a year is not enough, they need to keep growing or the shareholders could go another year without renovating the guest bedroom bathroom on the auxiliary yacht.
If it gets baked into a proprietary piece of software that works within a proprietary OS that actively supports this, good luck.
Microsoft fucking sucks, but they're not stupid. You'll get the ads as long as they want you to see them. Any and all efforts made until now to "debloat" windows to remove adware and bloatware work purely because they haven't been enough of a nuisance to microsoft bottom line to intervene, but be sure that as soon as they become one you'll be shit out of luck.
Sure, but with SteamOS on the horizon to make Linux plug-and-play accessible for gamers, locking down Windows would just be lighting the Xbox on PC/PC Game Pass investments on fire, particularly given this would be against Steam ToS and would effectively reduce new Microsoft releases to “Epic Games Exclusive” levels of reach
linux plug and play IS here TODAY and has been for some time. if you people actually gave a shit about owning your pc you would be running linux already instead of talking about steamos which is just another distribution in the heap.
Sure, unless you’re playing a game with kernel anti-cheat- SteamOS is going to be the only linux distribution that actually has the market share and developer/user trust necessary to even potentially get those games working on linux. Until it comes out, you’ve gotta use Windows/Mac or you’re SOL
might be just me but i think people defending an operating system by pointing out that it is the only one that is vulnerable to kernel-level malware that they willingly install on their own computers because the malware ships with a mediocre-at-best videogame is a great example of how computer-illiterate people really are
Yeah I don't think picking a fight with steam is something anyone would like to do, and even if they did something steam quite literally has its own os now
Heh, MS is going to be moving Windows to a subscription based service as well. It's been in the works for years, they just haven't pulled the trigger yet.
The requirement to have a microsoft account in order to get past the OOBE in Windows 11 is part of that groundwork. That's how it's going to verify your subscription status and lock your physical hardware behind a monthly paywall.
Want to use more than 16GB of RAM? You need W12 Premium. Want to play games? You need the gaming add on that unlocks GPU acceleration. Want more then GbE networking? Want to use more CPU cores? Want to customize your background?
It's going to kill their share of the consumer PC OS market, but that's such a tiny piece of their income (I work in IT, you should see what they're raking in for licensing servers and azure and shit, makes Windows look like change from grandma's ashtray in her car) that they don't give a fuck. PLUS, they have the muscle to lock exclusivity in so that if you want to play the game at all (a subscription itself, most like) you need to have a valid subscription to Windows, too. And the AAA publishers will buy into this because MS is going to give them big wheelbarrows of cash to develop the games in the first place.
Going to be a lot of people switching to linux....assuming the hardware itself doesn't also end up getting subscription locked by then. Can't wait to have a sub to Nvidia and Microsoft and a Studio to play a fucking video game. Gonna be awesome!
I saw comments on Reddit when Microsoft were rolling back some of their bullshit on Windows saying something to the tune that Microsoft had "realised their mistake" and were now "listening".
They never learn. They never listen. They have nothing but contempt for you.
Step 1: Test water by announcing a feature that largely benefits you but disliked by the community
Step 2: Roll back the feature after huge backlash
Step 3: Get positive PR and praised by the community for listening to them
It's worse, they often use a "huge red flag" to hide something slightly less sinister that nobody notices because they're too busy celebrating the "win" for the consumer.
It's like someone comes up and says "I'm going to fuck your mentally handicapped brother" and then when everyone freaks out they say "ok, I won't" and then blasts loads in your cats fart cannon under your front porch while you say "Thank God he didn't do it"
There's also a very common strategy of introducing something egregious, knowing it will be hated, dialing back the worst parts, but it's still worse than before, but then the end users are thankful that it's not as bad as it was initially and feel like they got a win by getting the company to retreat back.
Except the final version was what they wanted to introduce all along.
If everyone despises ads and does not buy the crap product they are exposed to...why do the corporations keep insisting on the ads being seen? There must be proof that the ads work and are worth making the majority of users despise them.
It's because they DO work. Most people are kinda dumb and just go with what they see and hear. Name recognition means the simplest people will "have heard of that product before" (It was an ad) and buy it instead of something else.
EA patented showing ads on billboards in skate, score cards in FC26 and madden. And the advertising boards in FC26 has been showing real world ads all year.
EA at least doing ingame advertising in a non-disruptive way where players barely notice them and dont complain.
What microsoft is planning is if you pause the game, you might see a fullscreen ad, or if you dont do anything ingame for a bit, you might see a fullscreen ad. Completely disrupting gameplay.
There were also ad billboards on Burnout Paradise. It wasn't obnoxious fwiw.
Partially promoting real world things like Vizio, partially promoting itself/dlc, and partially promoting in-world things like the Rossolini Tempesta
Patent the most egregious version of what you want to do.
Everyone online gets mad and talks about how bad it will be
Introduce it in a very watered down version, it's no where near as bad as people were expecting so many say "oh well that's fine, I'll still play that."
People are now used to the idea, next time make it slightly worse.
Eventually, do the egregious version from the patent.
The second Windows stops being convenient for me I'm jumping. But I have a castrated LTS win 10 and have had no problems since I set it up, so I don't bother going to a distro.
Idk if I have gotten the wrong impression, but it seems to me like whenever I read about Linux instructions for installing something, there is always a bunch of extra CMD code and shit to run. Big turnoff for normal people who dont have a PHD in coding or whatever.
This will couple well with the patent for using eye-tracking technology to pause ads if it detects you're not sitting there like A Clockwork Orange watching them.
Ads in cars, ads in streaming services that were as free, as in games, ads in games that you will ave to earn credits for ad free time, ads in our skies via drones, ads at the gas pumps that you can't mute anymore.
I honestly have advertising fatigue at this point. I'm just so sick and goddamn tired of being advertised some shit at every fucking opportunity and turn and even more-so when these companies actively force you into it without good opt-out options.
Hey advertisers, just so you know, when I see your product pushed in front of my face more than half a dozen times per day, it has the opposite effect on me now. It makes me actively think about not wanting to ever purchase your product again.
I feel for you guys. I'm older and my gaming days are limited now so this won't affect me in any meaningful way but you all shouldn't take it lying down.
I mean you would never buy a game that does this. I guess they could patch it in after launch. But then would you ever buy a game from that company ever again?
Now here this, if your company puts ads in a game I will not buy it. I will then not buy anything from you ever again. No matter what. This shit has to end.
Guys, I think it might be time we all just start going outside again. All of the big tech companies have failed us and are trying to create a dystopian nightmare
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u/PCMRBot Bot 23d ago
Welcome to the PCMR, everyone from the frontpage! Please remember:
1 - You too can be part of the PCMR. It's not about the hardware in your rig, but the software in your heart! Nationality, race, gender, sexuality, religion, politics, and PC specs don't matter! If you love or want to learn about PCs, you're welcome!
2 - Think owning a PC is too expensive? It's cheaper than you may think. Check http://www.pcmasterrace.org/builds for our famous builds and ask for tips and help here!
3 - Consider supporting the folding@home effort to fight Cancer, Alzheimer's, and more, with just your PC! https://pcmasterrace.org/folding
4 - Need a PC?! We're running a Worldwide giveaway for lots of awesome ASUS ROG hardware, including a Dream PC Build! Check here
We have a Daily Simple Questions Megathread for any PC-related doubts. Feel free to ask there or create new posts in our subreddit!