Microsoft has a patent application for pausing your game to show you an ad. Published on September 3, it describes a system that suspends play at a quiet moment, plays “promoted content”, then grants a credit that holds off the next break for a while. Not on public displays, but on private user displays. It is becoming increasingly obvious that Microsoft is trying to blur the boundary of where ads are acceptable, and this time the boundary runs through the games themselves.

This patent is not just a library or a kit a game developer opts into. The ad system can sit on the console, the PC, the TV, or the server streaming the game, and it can freeze play “at the operating system level”. It can also work without the game telling it anything. The filing describes a module that watches for save screens, pause menus, and round-end screens on its own. Imagine playing with Kinect was still a thing — advertisers would love to hear more about the right time to place an ad.

Xbox has worked this angle before. There was the Xbox One debacle, the same console with a Kinect requirement at launch, and Microsoft pulled back on it. But Microsoft also wanted the console to be the entertainment center of the home, with the cable box running through it and TV listings laid over live TV at the 2013 reveal. Looking back, it was an odd choice for a gaming console to work as a bridge, or a switch, for TV. Now it sort of makes sense. Add the app promotions in the Windows 11 Start menu, and Microsoft is constantly fighting for more ad space.

There is a version of this I would understand. A game streaming service could serve an ad before the game launches, or while you wait in the queue. Albeit controversial, that is no different from a streaming subscription with ads. Back in June, Xbox’s chief strategy officer, Matthew Ball, clarified that he meant cheaper ad-supported tiers alongside ad-free ones, like Netflix and Disney+, and that he personally thinks interrupting gameplay with ads would be a bad move. I don’t think that is much of a defense, though. Xbox already offers a subscription where a system like this would fit right in, and you don’t need a new patent to put an ad on a loading screen.

Putting ads inside games people already paid for, or even inside freemium games, is likely going to upset the player base those games already have. The idea has been tried, by the way. Social games and mobile games hand out items or in-game currency for watching an ad. But there is a difference between that being a feature in one particular game and being embedded system-wide. Microsoft’s filing describes the second, and it fits every Microsoft ecosystem, from Xbox to Windows.