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 Digg.com Facebook Google Bookmarks N4G Gamerblips del.icio.us Reddit Slashdot.org StumbleUpon Hmmm, I would be sceptical had I still got my 360. :| I block all ads in my browsers, so can I have that experience?
It just occurred to me that there's only really a couple of options, and only one practical one.
Firstly, they could put ads in amongst the NXE windows. That would be f*cking annoying and mean we have far more crap to flip through than we do already.
The only other way I can think of is adding them to the space that's already there, in the top right corner. Maybe like a smaller version of the NXE windows that automatically progress like the features here at CVG do.
That's the only one I can think of working, and it's going to block anyone's custom (and premium, I'll remind you) dashboard pictures. So you pay for the service and you pay for a background, but they block it with ads anyway.
There is no way this is going to be unobtrusive and the dashboard is going to be horribly crowded and full of clashing colours. either make it free or lower the price considerably because paying for a service warrants zero advertisements, like paying for a TV license means no third party advertisments on BBC channels for example. Like I said yesterday, chances are these will be in the same design as they currently are and relate to games (like we see for DLC) or promotions that are being run, again like we already see.
Silverlight will just be getting used so they are flashy looking and move around instead of being static.
I doubt we will see anything that takes away from finding games or anything, didn't they have flash ads in the old dashboard anyway?
Doesn't really bother me unless it stops me playing games, or takes away completely from the system. They won’t make it free, and are incredibly unlikely to lower the price as the majority will still pay while they take in more money from advertising. As a money business they exist purely to turn a profit. In any way possible, hence this.
It remains to be seen how much of an actual impact this will have, but should the adverts become any more intrusive than they are already it’ll be bobbins, especially any pop up ones, if they happen I will actually sell it and buy a PS3. Yeah I'm fairly sure the blades interface was pretty plastered with ads. People like to complain though, eh. Microsoft is having a laugh. They're trying to "integrate it with the existing sytem". Nobody's going to say "Oh, well that's all right then", nobody actually wants these ads, it's just greedy Microsoft raking in more cash. Maybe the ads will be relevant, for the first few weeks, and descend into chaos, such as GameDaily's adverts, describing "Fitness Regimes For Busy Mums". Of course you do CVG, that's why we all have to put up with annoying adds slowing down and interfering general browsing on your website. It's like f'in Piccadilly Circus or Times Square. Some play their games because they want their escapism. Being forced to reads ads yanks you out of the imaginary world you use to briefly get away from the daily pressures of capitalist life.
Therefore I would say ads definitely interfere with your experience. Ad's have forever been on the Xbox Live network, Just not as noticeable. For instance the Adidas event, was actually an advert.
People are moaning that you are already paying 40£ a year, for xbox live access, And that if they bring ad's in they should lower the price, or make it free online access.
All I am saying is that, they will not be so noticeable that you will feel unhappy about it. They will work with what the community has, it is probably going to be gaming adverts anyway. But whats more, you do pay 40£ a year, but ontop of that. When they bring ads in, they get more money. Which means even better services for Xbox Live?, So I am all for this. It isnt like I am going to purposely look at an advertisement, or seek advertisements out, My ritual is from dashboard to game, Nothing more.
If they scrap xbox live subs, this will mean it is now free = influx of members onto the servers = slower servers.
Whats more, is that if it does go free, Microsoft WILL be forced to downgrade there servers to the standard of PSN Servers, and that. Is something no body wants.
Come on guys, its just a little eyecandy, thats all. A great way to bring more females into gameing would be to have Tampon ads on me dash. You could have special ad related DLC, Gears of War Period, fight your way out of the womb at the wrong time of the month..... bring it on................ Not again?????????????
Think I might actually try and get some work done today :( . Sounds like a load of underpants to me.
Mind you, I would point out that Live is full of adverts already. The video marketplace is full of adverts for films, special promotions are highlighted on the NXE and what are trailers and demos really other than playable adverts, anyway?
As long as the adverts aren't for things like soap, washing up liquid, toothpaste and yoghurts, and instead advertise games and special promotions (for instance, 'download this demo and get a special voucher code for £5 off the full game') then it might actually be good.
Having said that, this is Microsoft we're talking about. I fully expect to see my GTA IV advertising boards filled with 'Tescos Buy 1 get 1 free on Glade Plugins' and my squad in Modern Warfare 2 sponsored by Dettol with a big 'Walkers' logo on their flak jackets. Shudder. More money for Microsoft then. I wouldn't mind as long as it doesn't slow the system down, it's bad enough as it is now. I good option would be to have the choice though to have them blocked. I second that. Fee and ad free or no fee and ads. Take it or risk losing paying customers, MS. What a nice pity party for MS, however I'm not touching whatever kool-aid you're drinking on this occassion, KM. At no point has an official promise been made that the extra income generated by ads will be spent to improve LIVE nor benefit the customers in any shape, way or form yet many of them still get the dubious pleasure of paying for it as well. It's adding insult to injury. The time honoured golden rule regarding these matters is that if you charge customers for access then they are spared the annoyance of ads. If there are ads then the service is free. This concept works because many people generally don't like to get nothing for what they are paying, or worse yet, paying to be inconvenienced which is exactly what this ploy appears to be angling towards. The preliminary verdict for MS on this matter: Do not pass "Go", do not pick up 200 dollars and there's no "Out of jail" card. Well i'm paying £300 a year for my Internet service and yet the very page this comment is on is full of adverts. Think I'll wait and see if it's actually annoying and intrusive or not, then vote with my feet. There may be no official statement for the Public, bet certainly is for behind closed doors ;),
kool-aid? Dont be daft. See I really don't think we'll start seeing adverts for Persil or Pedigree Chum. When they say "ads" I'm pretty sure they mean exactly the same adverts for games and films that we already have in the "what's new" and "spotlight" areas. Same here, although I'll be voting with my wallet. :) Depends on the site you go on though. This page as a few... with popout ads also. Good job there is no mouse pointer on the dash that you could accidentally mouseover and popout a massive hulking advert :) Ah, so I guess this finally means they won't need to charge for Gold then?
And pigs will fly. :lol:
M$ lol See what they can get away with when the competition stop trying.
Yes people will be annoyed, but considering the alternative, I don't think this will affect anything. Paid Membership = No ads... staple of the internet...
M$ breaks the rules again.
C. If this comes to pass and does end up being a pain in the ar$e then I'll cancel my Gold membership and just use the 360 for off-line gaming, if enough people do the same, Microsoft will soon alter their view on ads. Let me introduce you to the real world. Where you pay for Sky - yet you get adverts. You pay to go to the cinema - you get adverts. You buy a magazine - you get adverts. You pay for the internet - you have to pay more for sites where you don't want adverts. It's nothing new, and it's being blown out of all proportion. well i don't mind streaming the latest movie trailers from the dashboard..i streamed the new harry potter trailer today,looks quite good actually
and in the past we have seen ITV sport trailers,which i didnt mind either It's not quite the same thing. The webpages you are visiting are, in most cases probably, not the webpages of your internet provider and thus they are not responsible for the ads on this or any other website not operated by them. Your charge doesn't stick. »
Being daft in this instance would be to implicitly trust MS without raising questions and receiving binding statements and empirical evidence from them first. MS are having a laugh. If it was the PSN I'd say fair play as the service is free, but MS can stick its £40 a year up its bloated backside. I for one wont be renewing my sub now. I dont care if they dont get in the way, they shouldn't be there at all full stop.
What I cant understand is that the PSN is pretty much the same as XBL apart from two things which are cross-game direct invites (although you can still just send a text message) and cross-game voice chat, and that is it. Both of the services run at the same speed and the experence is just as good on either, but MS charge you £40 a year and Sony offer it free.
Now MS want to put thrid-party adverts on the dashboard and there is no word that they will stop charging the sub! At least Dick Turpin wore a mask, MS do it with a smile on their greedy face.
Stuff like this will anger people and will aid as a push for them to jump ship to the PS3. XBL is a great product, one that they continue to update, enhance and provide great content for. Now, all this work and increasing content needs to be paid for, right? It doesn't just appear out of fresh air - there are salaries to pay and servers to maintain.
This isn't just demos, trailers etc., it's all the hard work and resources that give you all your online leaderboards and multiplayer gaming.
Would you rather that they put in a few adverts that won't get in the way so that they can pay for the mountain of great content (and even more content coming up in the autumn), they start charging £50 a year or that they just stop developing XBL? True, however having well functioning online features for games could easily entice more gamers to buy games and play them on the Xbox 360. Throw in ads and remove subscriptions and all sides stand to gain something. I don't feel an ounce of sympathy for the argument that "servers cost money, blah blah". So what? Many things do. No one is forcing MS to take on that burden, and if they continue to charge while throwing in ads then it is the customer that loses out yet again. It's not the customer's problem how MS is going to pay for the costs of maintenance. That's part of doing business and while costs are always passed on to the customers, some are more justifiable and readily accepted by the consumer public than others. If they do continue to charge and throw in ads I sincerely hope there will be a mass exodus from paid membership. Ultimately the one message any business usually understands is money gained or money lost. The problem, as far as MS is concerned, is that all those lovely free Silver accounts don't actually make them any money and still use bandwidth to download demos and videos. I can appreciate that they might want to scrabble back some cash from the freeloaders.
However, that certainly doesn't justify doing it to the paid members. It's not like they can even say they need two versions of the software, because it'd be easy enough to implement a check where the ads disappear once it's seen your account status.
Laziness and greed, that's all there is to it. personally i dont want these ads it will only take bandwidth away from the servers and make the dashboard run slower and if you start to give free live then whats to stop cheaters and pirates from opening up multiple accounts i dont mind paying £35 a year and i think that's a big enough deterrent TOTAL GRRED WE ALL KNOW THATS WHAT MS IS ABOUT!!!!!
COME TO PSN PEOPLE!! IM SURE YOU WILL IN TIME ANYWAY. eye candy is something you'd WANT to look at... We're not talking about the real world here... we're talking about the internet world.
I can't think of any internet site that you pay for that has adverts on it...
I can think of plenty of free internet sites that don't have adverts...
Let's draw parellels where there are parellels shall we?
C. /thread
Now go get some fresh air before you all explode. I never thought they would mess with the gaming portion of live but they will indeed be a part of something I pay $50 a year for and would rather not be hammered by ads directed at 12 year olds. If this makes LIVE free then I'm cool with it. I love looking at eye candy, now the suns been out for so long there’s fecking loads of it out and about all day on the streets, on the bus, in the pub, in the park. I love the summertime.
Adverts no! Unless they contain summerly ladies. How the hell does having ads on LIVE advance the gaming experience?? fuking numpty is talking out of his arse!prepare to be frustrated people! So PSN is free with no ads, and mircosoft charge £40 a year to use their live service which is a joke in itself but now to make the joke even funnier thy are plastering ads all over it! LOLZ!
dear oh dear, how can anyone want to continue paying for this service without feeling like total clown shoes is beyond me, are you happy being microsofts butt gremlin? paying for something that should be free while steve ballmer laughs at you while tucking into his Unicorn Burgers.
360 is truly a console for gamer lites, folks complain about the cost of a ps3 or a gaming PC but at least you dont throw money away each year on live subscriptions and replacment consoles. RIP XBOX 360, maybe next time :twisted:
OI!! MICROSOFT!!
THE BEST WAY FOR ENSURE ADS DONT INTERFERE WITH OUR GAMING EXPERIENCE IS
DONT HAVE THEM
WE ALREADY PAY TOO MUSH FOR YOUR 'SERVICE' SO NO TO ADS :twisted:
OI!! MICROSOFT!!
THE BEST WAY FOR ENSURE ADS DONT INTERFERE WITH OUR GAMING EXPERIENCE IS
DONT HAVE THEM
WE ALREADY PAY TOO MUSH FOR YOUR 'SERVICE' SO NO TO ADS J1GSAW - ...360 is truly a console for gamer lites, folks complain about the cost of a ps3 or a gaming PC but at least you dont throw money away each year on live subscriptions and replacment consoles. RIP XBOX 360, maybe next time
Grow up you cretin. Most people have gotten over the childish format war tripe you seem to be fixated on. I own a gaming PC, a 360, and PS3 and even a Wii (as well as numerous retro gaming consoles and computer systems), and funnily enough, don't consider myself to be a 'gamer lite', as you so densely put it. I enjoy good games, regardless of whatever system they are on. And so should you if you want to be considered 'a proper gamer'.
Back to the subject at hand, which is the shameless profiteering employed by Microsoft. People are quite rightly annoyed at finding their paid for bandwidth is going to be taken up by ads...whatever they are for. I'm happy to pay a subscription for a service that allows me and my mates to get together and play in parties with the minimum inconvenience and minimal lag, and have so far seen the subscription as a necessary evil in order to get my online gaming fix.
However, I for one will seriously consider voting with my wallet if the ads are either intrusive visually or have a detrimental influence on my online gaming experience.
Whether this will cause me to use my PS3 more for online gaming is debatable as I know one other friend with a PS3 and about 2 dozen with a 360. I'll probably just spend more of my time gaming on my PC instead. Surely anything that generates more revenue for platform makers is a good thing? Maybe if Sony did likewise they could aford to sell their console at decent price. :? Good point, but Sony seem to prefer the 'charge people for a virtual t-shirt / pot plant / vase' in Home method of raising revenue. Which to me, doesn't seem too hot an idea either.
As other people have suggested, I agree with the principle of having to put up with ads if the service is free, or remaining ad-free if the service is paid for. Regardless of whatever system we're talking about. They don't force you to buy it. I still stick to what I said yesterday about this in that Gold members already pay for this service and should be excempt from ads.
Wheather it becomes intrusive remains to be seen, but it'll still annoy a heck of a lot of people, myself included. We get enougth ads from the media as it is nowadays with a lot of Tv programmes only showing the starting credits and the ads are on already before the programs even started(Terminator Sarah Connor Chronicles springs to mind)!??! The last thing we need is more ads stuffed in our faces, especially when a lot of people are paying £40 a year for this service. Very true. Can't argue there - don't want to either.
Just commenting that I don't like the idea of paying for the XBL service only for it to be peppered with ads and I think the whole pay for virtual clothing for avatars thing is bl00dy daft too, (something MS have also tried to tap into with the MS dash avatars as well). well i'll be buying a cheaper, slimmer ps3 when they start all this shenanigans I saw someone state somewhere (might not have been here) that the silverlight could just be used for animated adverts replacing the existing stills used in ads/promo stuff you get on the dashboard.
I am hoping this is the case, but apparently MS are in it for the money, so we'll see.
Charging silly amounts for an HDD and wireless, and charging for XBL doesn't seem to have done them too much harm, so it's not like they've already learned a lesson here! | 
