Xbox’s new Chief Strategy Officer (CSO), Matthew Ball, says the company is exploring new ways to make games, streaming subscriptions, and consoles affordable to consumers. One of those potential approaches? Ads.
Ball compares this idea to streaming platforms’ ad-supported subscription tiers, which are cheaper than ad-free plans. If Xbox does choose to introduce ads, he says, the brand would use “careful restraint” to avoid disrupting gameplay.
At first, Ball’s comments—which he clarifies he made when he was only 10 days into the job—were misunderstood to mean he supported the concept of in-game ads.
“At no point do I even mention in-game ads,” he wrote in a response to an X post on Thursday. “What I do say is that ads should be used to offer more affordable alternatives alongside today’s ad-free experiences, in the hopes [that] more could play as a result. Similar to how Netflix and Disney+ have ad tiers with all the same content, but at half the price or so.”
Microsoft has reportedly looked at private ad marketplaces for free‑to‑play games and would likely initially focus on ads that promote its own ecosystem, like discounts on games or Game Pass promotions. The company has not announced specific games, timelines, or formats, and traditional ad‑free experiences will remain available for users who prefer them.
Ball’s comments come after new Xbox CEO Asha Sharma warned that the console market faces rising hardware costs, making cheaper devices crucial for the business to survive. Sharma says component prices and RAM and storage needs have pushed hardware costs up rather than down later in the console cycle, breaking the old assumption that consoles naturally get cheaper over time.
She adds that many players cannot spend “thousands of dollars” on a next‑generation console and says Xbox is considering major changes to its business model, including subscriptions and new hardware tiers.
