I can’t remember the last time I’ve watched TV and didn’t skip through all the commercials or use the restroom during live sports breaks. The only commercials I see are the short blurbs on YouTube. The last one I saw was for Windows11 which had Xbox pretty prominent in the advert or the Microsoft Surface brand logos on the NFL Football benches
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Here in Brazil it is currently terrible. Xbox BR does a terrible job. Xbox BR is a joke among the Brazilian Xbox community. Recently some news were posted with Google translator.
Something so different from the excellent work that Microsoft was doing in Brazil in the past.
Xbox has everything to dominate Brazil today, xcloud is a great success in a country that is extremely expensive to buy a console, but the promotion is horrible.
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Guess it depends what folks refer to when they are talking ads. Online stuff is pretty targeted. If they are expecting TV and busses and movies (etc.) we don’t see much of that here either.
Yeah I mean honestly that’s the only type of marketing I see other than billboards/buses. I don’t listen to radio or read newspaper or watch TV other than Netflix which doesn’t have ads. Online ads are really the only thing that would reach me.
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The google translate thing or sloppy direct translations which sound awful in local languages seems to be another Xbox thing we have in common huh.
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Xbox official blog post itself has only 6 languages, while PS Blog has 11, almost the double. And MS is not the smaller company here, it’s a huge issue, they even recently added some languages, before that there were even less.
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That’s a really easy fix too with Google translators api. I could literally write a script to put it into 30+ languages and it’d take only a couple hours…
Yeah it wouldn’t be perfect but it’s be better than what they got.
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A company like MS should professionally translate at least double the language they are doing now for Xbox Wire. The irony is that MS site, like Windows, is available in any language you can imagine, a testament of how huge MS is.
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Yeah but if they aren’t professionally translating them (which I agree they should be), then they should at least automate translation to a bunch of languages. It’s simple enough.
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I just saw a Far Cry 6 commercial with Xbox Series X/S marketing wile watching NFL lol
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One thing I haven’t seen discussed much though is the advantage gamepass has with marketing. Eve. With sub 30 million subscribers it trends multiple times a week on social media and gets rave comments when adding games from the media. None of the competition has anything like that.
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Yes, Game Pass is the key to many things. Especially for PC, that market is huge here and has been for a long time.
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I don’t think Xbox and MS go in much for traditional advertising. I saw a Far Cry 6 ad in the UK yesterday during the football which was obviously an ‘xbox ad’ but I rarely see all that much.
I see a fair amount online but nothing too crazy. I don’t know if its an MS policy thing to focus on online partnerships and word of mouth and alt marketing. But they definitely have way scaled back the traditional stuff. I can understand it to an extent but equally as stated many don’t even know what gamepass is (I mean they know the basics but the real value is not clear) and that’s something they could push more. Saying that I’m sure they know the return on all this and make data driven decisions based on cost and interest and probably have concluded they drive more via their online partnerships and streamers etc than they do via traditional marketing.
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I am yet to see an advert, online or anywhere else, that really nails explaining what Game Pass is to a non-core gamer audience in a clear and unambiguous way.
All of MS’ Game Pass marketing seems to assume that the viewer already knows what it is on the most basic level.
That said, while I don’t speak Japanese, the advert they showed at TGS certainly looked like this was what they were doing. A version for western audiences put out around the holiday season would do them wonders.
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Yeah, if you want to reach “3 billion gamers”, having more than 6 languages on your news website is a minimum.
MS still has a lot to do if they want to be more global.
I noticed the same thing during the xCloud loading screens. Some sentences were weird because I think they used some Internet translator and it didn’t translate properly.
But maybe it changed, I didn’t pay attention recently.
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I think menus on Xbox dashboard are machine translated, because of some questionnaire I did on the Insider App. That’s ok, in my language it’s generally well done, it’s not ok for news websites imo.
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Yeah I was going to say that I think gamepass is hard to market effectively for a new audience. The easiest thing is to say ‘the netflix of gaming’ and list loads of big games included etc…
But even the concept of first party titles coming day and date to GP…how do you explain that to a casual? Xbox games…they see FIFA or COD as ‘an Xbox game’.
A tv spot similar to the TGS one: you show the big games coming day one this fall, then you list the other perks (100+ games, console/cloud/pc, etc), at least for the big fall season I think MS has the funds for a tv spot, no? XD
They are only doing YT/Twitter advertising and it’s incredibly limiting, expecially for parents who watch mostly TVs or other demographics who don’t follow social media.
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Someone said in the Twitter thread that this is about the OG Xbox, not X|S.
Though I imagine that retail game sales on Xbox must be spectacularly bad across the globe. The system has embraced digital way more than the others and the user base followed.
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Yeah, they may have been waiting until they have some big obvious games to highlight this with, which has been a problem…
This holiday though, you have Forza Horizon 5 and Halo Infinite to highlight the point.
They can say ‘all Xbox exclusives available from day one’ and then have captioned clips from both games with release dates over the top.
Ideally, they would have a big third party in the same window to highlight as ‘New block buster releases on day one’.
Then a ‘a library of over 100 games at your fingertips for one monthly payment’ over a massive montage of varied and popular games.