Xbox dash "designed for ads", users discover ad block workaround

One developer has labelled the new Xbox 360 ‘Metro’ dashboard an advertiser’s dream” and criticised it for effectively hiding away a user’s game content.

"For me the truly disheartening news is that the ‘games’ tab on our game console is now several pages away from the start," Mommy’s Best Games boss Nathan Fouts told Eurogamer.

Videos is now before games. For better or worse, the new Metro layout is an advertiser’s dream. Every single page main page now has an advertisement on it (you can’t scroll away any more), there are dozens of secret little places to feature things, and it’s easy to get lost.

But simply getting to the main portal for Arcade, Games on Demand or Indie Games, or for that matter my own game library is a chore."

And backing up Fouts’ claims, CVG has word of a number of tech-savvy consumers who have discovered a way to block advertising content from Xbox Live. It works by setting up a manual block to Microsoft’s advertising domain.