It has been three weeks since Microsoft's in-game advertising patent application was made public. In the fourth week of September, criticism has been piling up overseas that the filing runs directly against the advertising principles Microsoft itself laid out two months ago. The USPTO published the application on September 3. Under it, the system picks moments when play naturally pauses, such as the end of a boss fight, a loading screen or a cutscene, halts the game and plays an ad. Once the viewer finishes the ad, they receive "credits" that buy a set period of ad-free play.
The controversy began with the official Xbox blog. GameY checked the original Xbox Newsroom post and found that on July 23 Xbox began testing ad-supported cloud streaming with Insiders. The test showed ads only before a session starts and allowed up to one hour of play at a time. In the same post, Xbox set out five principles for its advertising business overall, and one of them was "do not interrupt the flow of gameplay." US outlet Complex pointed out that this promise is the opposite of a patent that pauses a game mid-play to run an ad. Matthew Ball, Xbox's chief strategy officer, also said on X in June, in a personal capacity, that "interrupting the game experience would be bad." He drew a line, however, saying the remark did not speak for the company's plans.
User reaction is cold. Among the Reddit responses relayed by Complex was the criticism: "They want to turn console and PC games into mobile games. I already paid, and now I have to watch ads too." Some declared they would leave: "The more ads they push, the more I'll buy my games on PC instead of Xbox." Comment sections on the Xbox-focused outlet Pure Xbox were filled with posts saying they would get rid of their Xbox the day ads interrupt their games.
The worry does not end with a single ad. Gabriel Zaynescu, an ad-tech expert and Forbes contributor, argued that this filing should be read together with another Microsoft patent. That one covers technology that uses generative AI to read a player's behavior and even facial expressions and alter the game's content. Combined, he said, the two patents would form a "closed loop" that knows who the player is, what they feel and when they are about to look away from the screen. There is also an unfavorable precedent. EA put ads in UFC 4 replay scenes in 2020, then pulled them after user backlash.
According to Complex, the application was filed on April 23 and claims priority from a related Microsoft filing from May 2023. A patent application does not automatically mean a product will ship. Based on overseas reports, Microsoft has not said it plans to combine the two patents or apply them to actual games. With Xbox going through large-scale layoffs and studio restructuring and looking to widen its revenue sources, users are taking this patent even more sensitively.
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