A reader is unimpressed by Microsoft ’s new ‘This is an Xbox ’ marketing campaign and insists that Xbox has already gone third party. As a company, Microsoft is worth over $3 trillion and yet for some reason they have always had terrible marketing. Maybe they’re so rich because they don’t like spending money, including on talented staff, but that seems bizarre to me.
So if you’re wondering why Xbox always has such bad marketing (if it has any at all) it’s not actually specific to them, it’s the whole company. I say this, you’ve probably already guessed, because this latest marketing campaign for ‘This is an Xbox’ is just mindboggling bad. It blows past ‘I could do better than this’ and right through to ‘Anyone could have done better this,’ to the point where you begin to wonder whether Sony paid for the ads and Xbox doesn’t actually realise they’ve gone up everywhere.
The gist is, if you haven’t seen them (I assume GC will put some pics up here), that they’re showing off that you don’t need to own an Xbox console in order to play Xbox games, as you can use a PC, mobile device, or a smart TV. This is despite the fact that the Xbox cloud streaming service is still only in beta and, in my experience, is not very good – certainly not as good as GeForce Now. There’s no need to ask why they’re advertising all this right now because the answer is obvious: because Xbox console sales are in the toilet and it’s the only thing they can do.
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