Today, some folks turned on their Xbox 360s to discover Microsoft has updated the aging device. The new update fixes an annoying issue bugging players for a bit now, but it also slaps two big ads on the home screen for Xbox’s newest consoles.
As spotted by True Achievements on June 25, some players on the Xbox 360 subreddit shared the news that their old consoles looked a bit different when they booted them up. To their surprise, Xbox has updated the nearly 20-year-old Xbox 360 to fix an issue with game thumbnails and box art stretching out and looking weird. That’s nice! What’s less nice is that the console now has more ads on it.
I booted up my Xbox 360 to confirm that yes, the dashboard has been slightly updated. And I can also confirm that it now sports two different ads for the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S consoles on the home dashboard. One of these ads is a picture showing the newer consoles. That’s it. The other one is a QR code. That’s it. If you click on them, they do nothing at all. Neither ad even says “Xbox Series X/S” or lists a price or anything.
My guess is that Xbox wanted these ads to be something they don’t have to update for a long time, if ever, so they just slapped a QR code on the dashboard, allowing them to tweak the webpage it sends you to instead of having to update a 20-year-old console again in a few years.
While it’s nice that Xbox fixed a strange graphical bug that’s been a problem ever since Microsoft killed the Xbox 360’s servers in July 2024, it still feels really desperate of the company to shove new ads into the aging machine’s dashboard two decades later. Like, come on, let it retire in peace. Stop using the corpse of your past victories to promote new shit.
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