Xbox 广告负责人：不存在所有游戏都出现广告的情况

Microsoft is expanding its gaming advertising business — but that doesn’t mean players should expect to see ads across every Xbox game. 

Activision Blizzard built its advertising business, Activision Blizzard Media, by offering brands and IP holders the opportunity to show up inside prominent elements of the company’s game portfolio like Candy Crush Saga. After Microsoft completed its acquisition of Activision Blizzard, the company brought Activision Blizzard Media under the Xbox umbrella, renaming the division Xbox Media Solutions — and handing it the keys to a wider portfolio of prominent gaming inventory. 

Jonathan Stringfield has helped guide the transition of Activision’s advertising business over to Xbox, first as a vice president of global business research and marketing for Activision Blizzard Media and now as the vice president and general manager of Xbox Media Solutions. At GamesBeat Next in San Francisco on November 3, he joined GamesBeat lead news writer Alexander Lee (that’s me!) for a fireside chat about how Xbox’s ad business has grown over the past year, as well as how it fits into the broader evolution of Microsoft’s gaming division.

Xbox’s consoles and platform are how many gamers access premium console titles, which brands have long coveted as the crown jewel of gaming advertising inventory. Although the expansion of Xbox’s media business creates opportunities for advertisers to show up inside the platform’s premium games, Stringfield made it clear that he doesn’t view ads as appropriate for every game, and that Xbox would ultimately give studios discretion over whether or not to adopt them, with the goal of providing value to the player and keeping the broader ecosystem healthy.

“There is zero world where there is intention — written, explicit, implicit, or otherwise — that ads will be an option in all games. It might not even be the case on all features of the console, et cetera,” Stringfield said during the fireside chat. “Where we want to have these integrated is places where it makes sense — where it can actually provide value in a positive way. Even if that means the total reach that we can have is going to be perhaps smaller than if we brute-forced it, that’s okay.”

The Xbox organization is currently undergoing a wave of structural changes, layoffs, and divestments intended to stabilize Microsoft’s gaming division and position it for future success. Cloud gaming has evolved into a significant part of Microsoft’s strategy, with the company shifting from an unlimited-use Game Pass to a usage-capped, à la carte monetization model in September due to rising infrastructure and compute costs. Although Stringfield did not directly address the recent changes in Xbox’s Game Pass business model, he framed advertising as a way for game makers to subsidize cloud gaming, potentially providing alternative ways to access games and other Xbox features in the future. 

“At no point is advertising compulsory — there are many different ways that you can access these things,” he said. 

Beyond Microsoft and Xbox, the entire gaming industry is in the middle of a monetization reckoning, with traditional business models becoming unsustainable due to rising development costs, lengthy production cycles, and changing consumer habits. Stringfield suggested that advertising could become an increasingly important supplementary revenue stream for game makers of all stripes without necessarily replacing premium game sales or subscriptions.

“Either of two things need to happen if we want to stick with the model as it exists today: We either need to dramatically increase the price of games, which I don’t think would be terribly popular with folks, or we need to find other mechanisms to allow access,” Stringfield said. “When we talk about advertising — and things that are adjacent to it that amount to recurrent revenue, whether it’s subscriptions or otherwise — what this allows for is an alternative.”

The post Xbox advertising leader: ‘There is zero world’ where ads appear in every game | GamesBeat Next 2026 appeared first on GamesBeat.