Next Generation Xbox Advertising Onslaught News
Chris Leyton
21/03/2005
J Allard speaks about the prospects of product placement, micro-transactions and the marketplace...
When Xbox illusionary J Allard prepped an eager audience about the possibilities that the Next Generation Xbox could bring, itās fair to say the speech caught a number of people off guard when it came to the prospect of user-created content, micro-transactions and just a general Microsoft feeling of commerce across the whole experience.
In a revealing interview with the man behind the words, leading hardware site, Tomās Hardware Guide, has today caused further controversy and a split of opinions with the premise of advertising permeating through into The Guide.
Citing the alleged spiralling costs of game development, Allard comments on the need to "bring some more money into the ecosystem" in order to create more elaborate videogames, a subject that brought worrying comparisons to the overt product placement featured within Steven Spielberg's Minority Report.
The perils of slamming an advert into gamers face at every possible opportunity were not missed by Allard however, with the warning "Because our audience - more than any other audience, because it is an interactive medium - will vote. They can vote much more easily than a TV audience, because they've got their headsets on and they'll complain about it. So I think it will be tough for advertisers to figure out how to do it in the least intrusive and least obnoxious way that shatters their illusions. They've got to be really, really thoughtful about how they interface with the user. And I think it's really challenging, but if they can figure it out, there's a great upside."
Allard also divulged details on what Micro-Transactions and The Marketplace would offer to gamers, with the suggestion that it's targeted towards getting the mainstream into the Next Generation Xbox experience.
Suggesting that Microsoft have to re-define their definition of "play" to reach the mainstream, Allard painted a picture of an Xbox Live! gamer who prefers to sell her own creations instead of booting up Halo and going through the hassles of learning how to play it.
This is an interesting point and bears a close similarity to that of Nintendoās stance, which claims that gamers are getting too complicated and citing the need to simplify the experience to break through the audience barriers and truly enter into the mainstream ā“ but on the other hand itās this approach that is causing fury amongst the hardcore gamers and current bread-and-butter for Microsoft in particular.