It starts with game pass
A self-directed conceptual campaign rollout for Xbox using its existing brand platform.
The idea celebrates some of Xbox’s most popular titles, available on its Game Pass subscription service.
The BRIEF:
Design an ad campaign for Xbox, leverage the platform’s variety of games and IP to increase product and content awareness.
The approach
I wanted to develop a campaign completely from scratch, and as gaming is something I’m extremely passionate about, I thought it’d be fun to give this a crack.
I came up with a simple concept: “It starts with Game Pass.”
Gaming takes us to amazing places, bringing us incredible experiences and Xbox’s gaming platform is accessible across Cloud, Console and PC.
The campaign tagline becomes a unifying ethos, with Game Pass as the constant that bridges experience, devices and players together.
The brand platform
The core design language of this conceptual campaign has been derived from Xbox’s current brand platform, which was used to carry the controversial “This is an Xbox” Campaign.
This campaign was extremely divisive with Xbox’s hardcore player-base, the most vocal of which expressed frustrations at Xbox effectively telling its userbase they didn’t need to buy Xbox hardware anymore.
It alienated the core fanbase, chasing tomorrow’s customers and taking today’s for granted. Personally, I saw a lot of merit in the ad from the perspective of Xbox looking to expand its player base - but in a world where Xbox has struggled to move hardware units, the perception of the brand “giving up” was very real; to the point where Xbox’s new CEO pulled the disruptive campaign as one of her first acts as new head honcho.
This ad campaign is something I’d love to push back at Xbox with, as an idea that celebrates the content available on the Xbox ecosystem, rather than the devices it’s possible to play Xbox games on.
The imagery
The Key Visual concepts were all designed using Midjourney’s AI Image Generation tools to create photorealistic props.
I then brought into Photoshop to craft the lighting, texture and shadows, as well as super-imposing an Xbox controller into each scene to ground them in the world of gaming.
Referencing the games Halo, Indiana Jones, Sea of Thieves and Microsoft Flight Simulator, I was able to create a suite of assets that established a consistent visual art direction that looks great if they stand alone, or together.
