In its recent history, Xbox has accomplished few esteemed deeds worth commemorating. Even as it attempts to pivot into a new era under new CEO Asha Sharma, it’s still suffering from the fallout of a persistent strategic malaise, having achieved little more in the current decade than acquiring a sizable chunk of the games industry just to lay it off, spinning up a games subscription service that served as a division-wide money pit, and briefly insisting that everything is an Xbox before realizing that gave everyone a reason not to own an Xbox.
Now, as its new leadership seems poised for another round of sweeping layoffs and studio closures, Microsoft’s gaming division has released a set of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 ads—spotted by Resetera user CloseTalker—that distill its years of dysfunction into one embarrassing disclaimer: “NOT ON XBOX GAME PASS THIS YEAR.”
According to the Meta ad library, the ads in question started running across Facebook, Instagram, and Threads on June 27. In a vacuum, the business decision clarified in their series-standard tactical coolguy font is a defensible one: In April, Xbox announced that Call of Duty games would no longer appear on Game Pass at launch after reporting emerged in October that the service had generated an estimated $300 million loss in sales of Black Ops 6.
Presumably, that’s because giving people an option to pay for a month of Game Pass instead of your best-selling series means you sell a lot fewer copies of your best-selling series. Especially once customers lose patience with the service’s prior habit of maddening pricing tiers, increasing subscription costs, and arcane restrictions.
It’s no surprise, then, that dropping CoD from Game Pass and lowering its pricing demands has led to improved revenue growth for the service. But while delaying new CoD entries’ addition to Game Pass libraries until a year after launch should help sales figures, the fact that ads must now disclaim YOU HAVE TO PAY FOR THIS ONE NORMAL-STYLE instead of 137 NEW WEAPON ATTACHMENTS or whatever feels like a surrender, brought about by pathologically confused brand messaging that hasn’t improved under the new regime. We used to have FAQs for these kinds of things.
But hey, at least we’re clear on how many of the letters in “Xbox” should be capitalized in official communications.
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