New Adtech From Microsoft Would Interrupt Your Game at ‘Promoted Content Trigger Events’

A patent application dated September 3, and seemingly first spotted by the gaming blog Respawn First paints a picture of future gaming that feels a little like the old “insert coin” arcade model. But instead of inserting a coin to continue, Microsoft would insert an advertisement. Into the player’s brain.

But—to be absolutely clear—the proposed invention theoretically allows this ad-view-as-transaction event to occur at some of the least irksome possible moments. Rather than, say, in the middle of a boss fight, Microsoft’s system would interact with the game engine so that it could serve “promoted content” roughly at set intervals, but only when a “promoted content trigger event” has signaled to the system that it’s a good time for an interruption.

The game itself would broadcast that the user was at one of the relevant events—a cutscene just ended, a goal was just reached, there’s a loading screen here, that sort of thing. Once the…