I cannot work out what this terrible new Xbox Game Pass advert is trying to say, but I know Microsoft has once again missed the point

Xbox is doing some marketing (something Microsoft's gaming division is often accused of doing, especially with new game releases) and has released an absolutely ridiculous ad to promote Xbox Game Pass. At first I thought everything was fine, a little strange of course, but everything was fine. The focus is on a comparison between renting games from the store in the past and accessing games through Games Pass today.

But the more I watched it, the more I found the very fabric of reality slipping away, the ad playing before my eyes, hovering in the center of the pitch-black room while my brain couldn't figure out what it was for. The concepts connected together in such a way that my brain thought it was okay, but as it played and played, over and over, it felt like an Escher proposal. Which begs the question: What is this new Xbox Game Pass ad trying to say?

Let's walk through it. A sad man appears in a darkened room, surrounded by boxes of Xbox 360 games. He is hot, tired, perhaps hungry. You'd assume he's hungry for food and water, but no… the view is through a crack in a darkened room and someone is placing an Xbox 360 game in the small room. It's Gears of War and the man is in a video store return box. The man grabs the box the way a man lost in the desert would if given a cheese sandwich. He shakes him and kisses him. “THAT WAS THEN” appears on screen before we cut to a glossy look at a modern gaming rig.

I'm all for absurdity, some of my favorite entertainment relies on it (hell, I made an entire series of videos that portray the game's media team as if it were being told in a cheesy daytime soap opera), but it just doesn't make any sense, does it? More people have been to Berlin than me.

If a person can't get enough new games, why is the return box full of games? There are plenty of them, but he acts as if he's seeing a Gears of War delivery for the first time in weeks. I worked at a video rental store and we were picking up returns multiple times per shift. By this metric, assuming this kind of return box is between empty spaces, this guy would be looking at over a hundred games being returned per day. What's his problem? Is 100 games a day not enough?

That's not even the most glaring problem I had with this ad, an ad I missed the first time I watched it. Like I said, the more I watched it, the more it didn't work on any level. The man from the past isn't even the consumer in this ad. So what comparison is made when we move to modern times? This guy previously didn't think enough video games were returned to the video store he worked (or hid) at, and now he plays a ton of games through Game Pass? This is not the basis for creating advertising – these are two different things connected through video games.

You could think of Game Pass as a sort of rental service, and I'm sure that's why this ad came up, but that's where the comparison falls apart if you think about it for more than five seconds. Previously, you could rent all new releases. Of course, sometimes they were not available, but it was possible. My store allowed people to rent up to three of them at a time for five days (if I remember correctly, this was over 20 years ago and I was usually busy watching 2 Fast 2 Furious on repeat and watching the N-Gage we had in the store) and it was a pretty good deal. Game Pass offers a variety of games, but you can't choose from all the new releases and you can't “borrow” games for a flat fee for a few nights. The comparison doesn't work.

There was also something wonderful about visiting a rental store, browsing the shelves with friends, and leaving with something new to play on the weekend. That was part of the fun – maybe grab some sweets and chips while you're there. I liked it, and I'd say a lot of the Xbox audience liked it too. I'm not offended by the depiction of antiquity here, but it just seems out of touch with the growing nostalgia for physical media and everything that comes with it.

“Now, new games are being added all the time,” says the promotional chatter that follows, the same man from the video return box has apparently found perfect peace and harmony in his current dimly lit life thanks to his Xbox Game Pass subscription. A life that immediately looks much less attractive than a bright and full of options video store, where 100 games a day would seem to be not enough.

“This is How We Play Now” ends the ad with a strange emphasis on the words “how” and “now” that makes it read like it’s a beat poem written by a 10-year-old who watched that season of “America’s Got Talent” and thought it looked like a piece of pie.

“No need to hover over the return field. With Xbox Game Pass, new games are added all the time. Play what you want, when you want,” reads the blurb accompanying the YouTube ad. I'll say it again. This doesn't make sense. It doesn't work. And this is from someone who values ​​the Xbox's place in the gaming market and the quality of Game Pass.

I know it's just an ad, but it reflects Xbox's confused view of modern gaming. Firstly, gamers are more nostalgic for the days of blockbusters than ever before. Game Pass may be more convenient for most people than driving to the store and spending 20 minutes on the shelves only to have mom say you can't rent RoboCop vs. Terminator, but the atmosphere here could be completely different and still allow Game Pass to come out on top – not that there's a fight going on, considering rental stores are long gone and brick and mortar stores in general are dying at an alarming rate. Game Pass could be marketed as a modern rental store, but it's not.

This ad (and you could probably extend it to Xbox in general, depending on how unkind you're feeling) is like one of those children's books where you can flip the pictures to put a badger's head on a cat's body, and then put on sneakers and a pirate hat for good measure. It's a mess and it struggles to have a clear identity.

I need to go out. I have no idea what happens next.