Modern Warfare 4 Ad Boasting "Not On Xbox Game Pass" Spotted

Xbox has made so many missteps after another that its Game Pass price cut in April already feels like a lifetime ago. It was able to cut the price by dropping another Call of Duty from the service, at least once a day, and the new Modern Warfare 4 ad wants to make sure you know that.

“No Xbox Game Pass this year”

The ad for Modern Warfare 4 was reportedly spotted on Facebook by ResetEra user CloseTalker, and it has quickly gone viral for how it proudly states that another Call of Duty Game Pass will not be coming on Day One. “No Xbox Game Pass this year,” reads the message in letters so big and bold that they take up more ad space than the game's name.

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The ad hasn't been confirmed to be 100 percent real, though it speaks volumes about the current state of the Xbox that many people saw it and immediately assumed it would do something like this. Giving this much advertising real estate a significant downside in terms of the next installment, whether or not it's the biggest series under the Xbox banner.

Is it the good boy Xbox or the dumb goose Xbox?

South Korean soldiers in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 4.

If the ad is real, there's an argument to be made that it's Xbox being the good guy. Hide a message like this in the small print, and the company is accused of trying to trick casual CoD fans into subscribing to Game Pass, or remaining subscribed, not knowing that Modern Warfare 4 won't be added to the service until a year after its release.

I'd be screaming about it now if I hadn't witnessed years of Xbox's vague messages surrounding Game Pass. Even at the high price, Game Pass is an incredible deal. this is The Netflix of video games, and it should be much more successful than it is today. One of the main reasons it doesn't happen is that Xbox hasn't done enough to inform casual gamers about what it is, how you get it, and what it includes.

I've had people in my life who owned an Xbox and they had no idea what Game Pass was, or that it existed, until I explained it to them.

Now that Xbox has negatives about Game Pass to inform the world, it wants to shout about it from the rooftops. The decision to remove future Call of Duty releases from Day 1 of Game Pass in order to keep the price down was a good idea. Making it a place where you finally give Game Pass real estate to your ads, not so much.