Xbox feels like it’s lost the pulse of the games world, and this new Game Pass add simply makes that case even stronger.
Xbox has been doing some marketing (something Microsoft’s gaming division has often been accused of barely doing, especially around new game releases), and it’s released an absolute clanger of an advert to promote Xbox Game Pass. Initially I thought it was OK, a little odd for sure, but fine. Centred on a comparison between renting games from a store in the past and having access to games on Games Pass today.
But the more I watched it, the more I found the very fabric of reality slipping away, the ad playing before my eyes, hovering in the centre of a pitch black room, my brain unable to figure out what any of it was for. The concepts are strung together in a way that made my brain assume everything was fine, but as it played and played, over and over, it was like an Escher sentence. Which begs the question: What is this new Xbox Game Pass advert trying to say?
Let’s walk through it. A sad man appears in a darkened room, surrounded by boxes of physical Xbox 360 games. He is hot, tired, perhaps starving. You might assume he’s eager for food and water, but no… cut to a view out through a slot in the darkened room and someone is posting an Xbox 360 game into the small room. It’s Gears of War and the man is inside a video store returns box. The man grabs the box, as someone lost in the wilderness might if presented with a cheese sandwich. He shakes it, he kisses it. «THAT WAS THEN» pops up onto the screen before we cut to a glossy look at a modern gaming setup.
I’m all for absurdity, some of my favourite entertainment leans into that (hell, I made a whole video series that imagined a games media team as if told via a trashy daytime soap opera), but this just doesn’t make any sense, does it? More people have been to Berlin than I have.
If the man is starved of new games, why is the returns box stacked with games? There are loads in there, but he acts as if the delivery of Gears of War is the first he’s seen in weeks. I worked in a video rental store, and we’d empty out returns multiple times each shift.
