Prodigious Gaming has a look at what might help Microsoft win the console war: ad enabled Xbox 360.
This means that the cost of the Xbox hardware and software could in part be subsidized by advertisements. This means that while you are grabbing a drink and your friends are waiting for you to return, they could see some advertisements for merchandise or other products totally unrelated to the game, or entirely related.
“We’ve actually got a couple of games out in the market now on the Xbox platform where we’re trialling some ads and we’ve been working with Massive on those couple of games… We feel very excited about advertising as a potential growth opportunity for the business,” said Lee.
“[In] markets outside of North America, the fundamentals of our business may not hold,” said Lee. “Consumers may not be accustomed to paying $50 for software and buying a $200, $300 or $400 device, an ad model may be a way to augment to kind of make the economics work for everyone.”
It will be interesting to see how this effects the cost of the Xbox 360 and its software, or how it effects the gamers. I consider myself to be very ad-blind and I probably would not notice or care about the rare advertisement, but it might just annoy some gamers enough to dump the console if done wrong.