Xbox Ads Are Frustrating Its Playerbase

If you were to pick a winner in the gaming week in terms of the various presentations that happened and the games that were revealed within them, you’d be hard-pressed not to pick Microsoft. Not only did they highlight games that are coming, but they also showed numerous highly-anticipated games that will be coming out next year and possibly beyond. That earned them a lot of goodwill with some people, as they were seen as being “behind the eight ball” given recent events with layoffs, shutdowns, and many of their exclusive games going multiplatform. But, the Xbox brand still has a lot to learn.

But don’t take our word for it; you need only ask the people of Reddit about what Xbox is doing to tick them off. Around the time of the showcase and the event that followed it, some ads started popping up on the console’s home screen. This isn’t the weirdest of things, as both Microsoft and Sony have ads on their home screens to promote both games and events. However, as the Reddit user below noted, this particular ad not only popped up when they were simply trying to start the system, but it covered the whole screen!

It’s not OK to boot up a console and see full screen ads. Any way to turn these off?
byu/VeryVideoGame ingaming

Indeed, they had to not only look at this massive ad, but then click out of it in one form or another. That’s not just annoying, it’s wrong. It’d be one thing if it was a somewhat big ad in one part of the screen, but the whole screen? And it being something you can’t avoid unless you’re offline? That’s just wrong. Sure, you could argue that Microsoft is just trying to ensure that its gamers knew about its important event, but that’s no excuse for clogging up their screens in a way that the other publishers don’t do.

Nintendo certainly doesn’t do this, and doesn’t even have ads of any kind on its main screen unless you go to the news section! As for Sony, their ads are much smaller in comparison.

Many consider this yet another misfire from the Microsoft brand, as they’re clearly getting desperate to not just get gamers’ attention but also try to bring them both to their console and their Game Pass service. While the showcase on Sunday was a great example of how to gain favor, this kind of thing with ads is how you lose it. No one wants to see unnecessary ads when they just want to play video games.