As pointed out in our news round up earlier today, Xbox LIVE Rewards is offering free Microsoft Points to dedicated Halo 4 players, but with the top tier reward requiring six hours of gameplay a day for the remainder of November, is the promotion irresponsible?
Microsoft has already endured some heat from certain sections of the American media this week, after deciding to drop one of the year’s biggest games on the day of the US presidential election.
Now just a day after its rather controversial release date, Halo 4 is once again coming in for criticism due to another surprising decision from Microsoft. As part of the Xbox LIVE Rewards program that offers prizes and most prominently Microsoft Points for fulfilling certain criteria, such as completing a survey or renewing Gold membership, now gamers can earn up to 600msp if they spend 140 hours in Halo 4’s multiplayer over the course of November.
That’s nearly six days in total, if you start today it equates to an average of 6 hours every single day until November 30th. Now videogames are fantastic, wonderful things as we all know, but everything has its limit. Games are a form of entertainment and it seems extremely inappropriate of a massive company to encourage such crazy usage. Not to mention the hot water Microsoft could find themselves in if a child, or anyone else for that matter, ends up in hospital after another infamous gaming binge.
What do you think, are Microsoft doing anything wrong by offering such a promotion?
Forrest_01
I thought we were supposed to take a 15 minute beak every hour or so (at least most games say something along these lines)? If you factor that in as well, you are looking at around 7.5 hours a day.
That is a full working day for a lot of people!
Whilst i did have some crazy sessions on BF3 when it was new out (9pm-6am a couple of times), it was only on one day a week, not every day for a month.
Unfortunately, i think the bad press is inevitable, as some people are stupid enough to think that 600msp is a good trade off.
LTG Davey
I would hazard a guess that powering a television and console for 140 hrs probably costs a fair bit more than 600ms points (approximately 5quid)… Silly people.
allan_treebeard
Well any arguments about kids playing for an excessive length of time can be countered easily by Microsoft as the game is rated as 16+, they can just say that kids shouldnt be playing it anyway. We know this isnt the case but that’s what they’ll say.