Xbox Live Gold should not have advertisements

So as you may or may not have read earlier, Major Nelson has told us that advertisements on the Xbox 360 Dashboard are going to be “enhanced” (Marketing buzzword ahoy!) using Microsoft Silverlight (Basically Microsofts version of Adobe Flash). Now for me, this has bad implications. Why? Because Flash-based (And lets face it, Silverlight is very similar from the end users point of view) advertisements on the web are usually intrusive and, not to mention, fucking annoying. Like the one below:

Lets face it, these pop-out ads are the new Pop-Up.

Similar advertisements already exist on the Xbox 360 Dashboard. For example, there are movie trailer advertisements that, when you scroll over them, start to play a movie trailer. I don’t want that. That kind of crap is bullshit.

I wouldn’t mind these advertisements so much if Xbox Live was free, but it isn’t. I mean okay, fair enough, give the Silver members ads, but do Microsoft seriously have the cheek to give Gold members, who pay £40 a year advertisements?

Now I know what the fanboys are thinking, “But you pay for your Cable TV service and you don’t complain about the ads on that!” This is different. When you subscribe to a Cable TV service, you are subscribing for access to additional TV Channels. I doubt that the actual channels themselves (Like, I dunno, MTV or something) actually receive much, or any of that subscription money at all.

The same applies to Internet Service Providers. I pay them a monthly fee for access to the Internet, but websites on the Internet don’t receive any of this money. They have to find their own way to make cash, such as with ad revenue.

Lets give an analogy. Lets say that my blog had advertisements on it, but my blog was free to read. But say I also offered a subscription model in which you could receive additional features or something. Would you be impressed if the ads were still there? I sure as fucking hell wouldn’t.

Basically what i’m saying is that Gold members shouldn’t have to see advertisements. I mean, when you sign in to XBL you’re immediately shown advertisements on the Spotlight channel for fucks sake. I give you £40 a year and you still shove ads in my face? Not cool. If these “enhancements”, as Major Nelson puts it, involves these ads somehow being more intrusive, then I simply don’t know what I will do, but i’ll certainly be a very dissatisfied customer. Microsoft already make money from Xbox Live and everything that sells on the Xbox Live Marketplace.

So the tl;dr is this:

Silver Members: Go ahead and give them ads. I recognise that Microsoft are a business and that they have to make money some way. Ad revenue for free accounts? Go for it.

Gold members: No. People who pay a subscription fee shouldn’t have to face ads. Especially those ghastly movie advertisements that play a trailer when you scroll over them. Some people view the ads as “useful”, so I dunno, give people the option to opt-out of them or something.

I also find it irritating that Microsoft have been wastiung their time on this when there are bigger problems that need to be sorted out. The Xbox Live Marketplace can be sluggish some times and at times my games library doesn’t even load up because my 360 is too busy trying to fetch ads from Xbox Live.

~ by pokeh on July 2, 2009.