metagame

Thou Shalt Max­i­mize Revenue

This has trial bal­loon writ­ten all over it.

Adver­tis­ers and cre­ative design­ers will soon have more artis­tic free­dom to turn cam­paigns on Xbox Live into inter­ac­tive and inter­con­nected expe­ri­ences reach­ing far beyond tech­nol­ogy for tele­vi­sion, Sean Alexan­der, direc­tor at Microsoft’s Adver­tis­ing Busi­ness Group, said Monday.

Per­son­ally, I don’t much care. Nav­i­gat­ing the XBox Live expe­ri­ence won’t be much changed when I get ads splashed about on the top or bot­tom or hid­ing in the cor­ners. And while I am well tired of pay­ing a sub­scrip­tion fee for con­tent and then still putting up with ads (hello, Sir­ius XM), Microsoft won’t be the last to go down this road.

Of course, your opin­ion may vary. DrezKill has a dif­fer­ent opinion:

But seri­ously, whether you have a GOLD account or not, f*ck dis shiznit!!! Gawd damn you Microsoft!!! Damn you to hell!!!

Look­ing over at my Xbox screen, this doesn’t really seem like any­thing new. Every­thing on the “front page” is really just an adver­tise­ment for a game, add-on, or piece of content.

Update 7/2/09: That’s no bal­loon! Larry Hrib, Xbox Live Direc­tor of Pro­gram­ming, con­firms that ads are com­ing to XBox Live. Don’t worry, though, they’ll be tasteful.