There has undeniably been a strategic change under the new leadership, but highlighting it this directly in advertising is exceptionally unusual.

Xbox has made hardly any notable moves lately that are worth commemorating. Even as it attempts to enter a new era under new CEO Asha Sharma, the company continues to suffer from the consequences of a prolonged strategic crisis.

Over the past decade, it has done little more than acquire a significant portion of the games industry only to sell it later, launch a subscription service that functioned as a money pit for the whole division, and insist for a short time that everything should be Xbox before realizing that it had given everyone a reason not to buy an Xbox.

Now, as the new leadership is reportedly preparing another broad round of layoffs and studio closures, Microsoft’s gaming division has published a series of Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4 advertisements that condense years of dysfunction into one embarrassing declaration: “NOT AVAILABLE ON XBOX GAME PASS THIS YEAR.”

According to Meta’s ad library, the advertisements began appearing on Facebook, Instagram, and Threads on June 27. Taken alone, this is a defensible business decision: in April, Xbox announced that Call of Duty games would no longer be available on Game Pass at launch, after reports in October claimed that the service had cost an estimated $300 million in Black Ops 6 sales.

That is probably because offering people the option of buying a one-month Game Pass subscription instead of purchasing your best-selling series will result in many fewer copies of that best-selling series being sold. This is especially true if users have lost patience with the service’s previously irritating pricing tiers, rising subscription costs, and mysterious limitations.

It is therefore no surprise that removing Call of Duty from Game Pass and easing pricing requirements improved the service’s revenue growth. But while delaying the addition of new CoD games to the Game Pass library until one year after launch is expected to improve sales figures, the fact that advertisements now have to say “YOU HAVE TO PAY NORMALLY FOR IT” instead of something like “137 NEW WEAPON ATTACHMENTS” looks more like capitulation.

That has not become any less confusing under the new leadership, and it creates an unusually muddled brand message. There used to be FAQs for things like this.

Source: PC Gamer, ResetEra, Facebook