MANY things these days feature advertising, but this is usual for services you’re enjoying for free.
We all expect adverts on YouTube, Twitch, websites, and on regular TV as we don’t pay for individual channels or pages.
However, we don’t expect adverts on things that we have paid money for, in particular expensive consoles like the Xbox Series X.
However, it appears that this is the direction that Xbox could be going with, as players have noticed new pop-up adverts.
Some players in the US have reported that when they boot up their console to play games, a full-page ad is displayed.
The advert is for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, a game that was recently bought by Microsoft as part of its deal to acquire publisher Activision Blizzard.
On booting up the console, an ad for CoD: MW3 covers the screen in bright red.
The advert reads: “Fight against the ultimate threat. Play the campaign now.
“Get the Vault Edition upgrade and get the Nemesis Operator Pack, Blackwell and more.”
There are then three options at the bottom for you to click on. The first one that your cursor defaults to is ‘Buy Now’.
Next to that is ‘Get the Vault Edition upgrade’, and finally, you can scroll over to ‘Exit’.
This obviously means that you need to clear the ad before you are able to get to the main menu and actually play any of your games.
While only players in the US appear to have been affected by the change, there are worries that this is a trial for the future.
It could be a trial to test players’ reactions to the ads, and see if they could push different ads or the same ones but in different regions.
However, players have reacted wholly negatively to the adverts complaining that they are ‘infuriating’.
If you want to read more about Xbox, take a look at the games being added to Xbox Game Pass in November.
Written by Georgina Young on behalf of GLHF.
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