The big Microsoft news yesterday wasn’t Kodu-related. No, the story of the day was about Xbox LIVE and Silverlight — a match made in ad hell, we’re sure. We speculated that the upcoming integration was no good. That it would only result in bringing more ads to a service that many shell out a good bit of coin for. According to Major Nelson, these thoughts aren’t accurate. While he successfully avoided mentioning that more ads wouldn’t appear, the Microsoft man did say that the Silverlight integration would make existing ads “more organic.”
“I’ve seen quite a bit of discussion today about how we’re bringing Silverlight ads to LIVE in the future,” Nelson said via his blog. “I need to let you know that you don’t need to worry about a huge influx of ads across the dashboard.”
“One of our core principles is to enhance, not interfere with the gaming experience, and we work directly with our partners to only deliver experiences that are relevant to the LIVE community,” Nelson continued. “Silverlight will help make those ads a more organic part of the dashboard, like we’ve done with some of the NXE slots in the past. No one on the team wants to turn the dashboard into something that looks like Shibuya Crossing. That’s just not good for anyone.”
It’s hard to believe that ads will enhance our experience, but we’ll take that line over dealing with a massive amount of new ads on a paid service any day of the week.
