Microsoft patents system to freeze games and inject ads during downtimes — watching commercials earns ad-free playtime credits

[u/screwdriverfan]

https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/microsoft-patents-system-to-freeze-games-and-inject-ads-during-downtimes-watching-commercials-earns-ad-free-playtime-credits

[u/ContributionNo8787]

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

[u/Transientmind → u/ContributionNo8787]

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.

[u/Yuzumi → u/Transientmind]

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.

[u/turbospeedsc → u/Transientmind]

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.

[u/NotaVortex → u/ContributionNo8787]

Which is funny because all of the best selling games, dont have any of this.