Mortal Kombat 11 Taken Over With Hogwarts Legacy Ads, Frustrating Fans
Mortal Kombat 11 just got a new update, and it sucks. Rather than giving us some new content or quality-of-life updates, it instead has adverts for Hogwarts Legacy invading the home screen, despite the two franchises having almost nothing to do with each other.
Whenever you boot up Mortal Kombat 11, the first thing you’ll see is a trailer for Hogwarts Legacy, as well as a prompt to take you to its store page. And if you’re mashing through the menu like I was, that’s exactly what it will do. It’s not even over once you’re past that, as a banner ad for the game will still show at the top of the screen, something that was previously used to advertise products at least vaguely Mortal Kombat related.
Judging by the posts made by pissed off Mortal Kombat players online, it seems that the ads were added late last night. We just checked it, and yep, sure enough, it was the first thing we were greeted with when we booted the game up on Xbox.
Even if you’re, sadly, the biggest Barry Trotter fan out there, it is concerning to see prominent, unskippable adverts like this in a premium game. For reference, Mortal Kombat 11 is still $49.99 on Steam, and $59.99 for the Ultimate Edition. With that in mind, you’d hardly expect to be sold another game the first time you boot up, especially one that’s completely different from Mortal Kombat.
The justification the game is going for is that both titles are published by the same studio, WB Games. But that doesn’t hold too much water when other WB-owned products haven’t been given this platform. Not even its other fighting game, MultiVersus, which probably could have benefited from more exposure before it was put on ice. That aside, there are pretty much no similarities between the two titles whatsoever. Unless this is WB’s way of telling us that Barry himself is joining the roster in Mortal Kombat 12, which seems incredibly unlikely.
Concerns about advertising in premium games aside, can we spare a thought for all of the fans who probably got their hopes up as soon as they saw a pop-up start to load on their screens? Mortal Kombat fans have been waiting for MK12 confirmation for months now, to the point where they’re over analysing a grain of sand that was spotted in a trailer for the series anniversary. With that in mind, it’s fair to assume that quite a few fans thought the ad would be related to Mortal Kombat 12 news, not a spin-off of a children’s book series.
Source: www.thegamer.com
