Home > News

Microsoft Reportedly Adding Ads to Xbox Games by Fall

By Laura Tucker
Microsoft Xbox Ads Featured

If you do a log of gaming on your phone or tablet, you’re very accustomed to seeing ads on your games. While it’s not a typical feature of gaming consoles, Microsoft has reported plans to add ads to the Xbox, as early as this fall. Read on to learn about how this could affect your gaming.

Also read: How to Use Your Xbox’s Co-Pilot Mode

Microsoft Exploring Ads on Xbox

According to sources, Microsoft is currently in the exploration phase with the plan to add ads to Xbox by the third quarter. It’s taking a closer look at placing the ads in free-to-play games and determining which adtech companies could be used to create an ad inventory.

The sources of this information gave an example of ads showing up on digitally-rendered billboards in a car-racing game. It’s unknown whether Microsoft’s plans will also include avatar skins or video ads in gaming lobbies.

Microsoft Xbox Ads Games

A disclaimer is warranted at this point: Microsoft has not confirmed these plans. It will say only on the subject: “We are always looking for ways to improve the experience for players and developers, but we don’t have anything further to share.”

Certain forms of advertising are already being used on Xbox. Purchased ads can appear on the Xbox dashboard through Yahoo and in certain games through Anzu.

Advertisers could use this platform to message Xbox users in the midst of their gameplay. Game developers would be provided the tools to sell ads.

Microsoft Not Interested in Ad Revenue

The sources claim Microsoft isn’t interested in the revenue this advertising would bring. The revenue would go to the game developers and adtech companies. Microsoft’s goal, it’s believed, is to build an Xbox ad network. The company wants to provide revenue to free-to-play game developers.

Microsoft Xbox Ads In Game

The sources added that these plans have been in the works as far back as 2018 or 2019. The release of the Xbox X and S in 2020 brought greater focus to these plans.

Yet, Microsoft is still moving cautiously, as there are concerns that adding ads to Xbox games could lead to irritation with users. According to the sources, the ultimate goal is to only add advertising that doesn’t disrupt gameplay.

Additionally, Microsoft doesn’t want to compromise customer data. While it has collected data on Bing, other sites, and software, the current plans are to not allow advertisers to use the data in the ads, as there are regulatory controls, and they’re not compatible cross-platform. One of the sources believes there is a 10-year-goal overall.

Microsoft Xbox Ads Gaming Console

Microsoft isn’t alone in its journey along this path. NBCU is beginning a partnership with Angu. Similarly, Microsoft has recently acquired Activision Blizzard and adtech platform Xandr.

OE Studios CEO John Higgins believes this is the direction all gaming companies will move in. Microsoft, if it follows through on these plans to add ads in Xbox games, would be preventing Sony and Amazon from collecting some of that revenue.

If you want to skip out on the gaming console and game on your mobile, read on to learn how to connect an Xbox controller to an Android device.

Subscribe to our newsletter!

Our latest tutorials delivered straight to your inbox

Laura Tucker Avatar
Laura Tucker
Laura has spent more than 20 years writing news, reviews, and op-eds, with the majority of those years as an editor as well. She has exclusively used Apple products for the past 35 years. In addition to writing and editing at MTE, she also runs the site’s sponsored review program.

Read next

From below of blue starry sky over radio telescope and trees with leaves
The Big Ear telescope was scanning at 1420.4056 megahertz on the night of 15 August 1977, the exact frequency at which hydrogen atoms vibrate across the universe, because Giuseppe Cocconi and Philip Morrison had argued years earlier that any species trying to be found would broadcast on that channel — and then, for 72 seconds, something did.
In 2016, archaeologists dated two rings of snapped stalagmites in France’s Bruniquel Cave to 176,500 years ago, evidence that Neanderthals had walked 336 metres into darkness with fire and built architecture deep underground long before modern humans reached Europe
Otto von Bismarck was 74 when Germany adopted the world’s first national old-age social insurance program in 1889, setting the pension age at 70 after years of fighting socialists with bans, laws, and a promise few workers would live long enough to use
When cosmonaut Valeri Polyakov stepped out of his Soyuz capsule in March 1995 after 437 consecutive days aboard Mir, doctors recorded him at several centimetres above his pre-flight height, and his spine had become so unaccustomed to gravity that the recovery team carried him to a chair rather than risk the compression of letting him walk.
When Bell Labs engineer Karl Jansky pointed a rotating antenna at the sky in 1932 looking for sources of transatlantic radio static, he kept picking up a faint hiss that peaked every 23 hours and 56 minutes, and he eventually realized he had become the first human to hear the center of the Milky Way.
A contemplative scene with two scientists in a vintage laboratory setting.
When Harvard astronomer Cecilia Payne submitted her 1925 doctoral thesis arguing that the Sun was made almost entirely of hydrogen, the field’s senior figure Henry Norris Russell talked her into adding a line calling the result ‘almost certainly not real,’ and then published the same conclusion himself four years later to widespread acclaim.
When seismic waves from the Chicxulub impact reached what is now North Dakota roughly ten minutes after the asteroid struck, they appear to have triggered a ten-metre standing wave in an inland river that flung fish onto the bank and buried them under glass beads still falling from the sky.
When survivors near Lake Nyos woke on the morning of 22 August 1986, the cattle were dead in the fields, the birds had fallen out of the trees, and 1,746 of their neighbours were lying where they had stood the night before, with no fire, no flood, and no wound to explain it.