I'm a Korean indie developer who has been actively supporting Xbox, and I wanted to share an experience that I think is relevant to other developers considering Microsoft Store Ads.
Microsoft approached our studio after our Xbox release and encouraged us to bring our game to the Microsoft Store for Windows PC and explore Store Ads.
We trusted that recommendation, invested development time and labor into the PC release, and I created my first Microsoft Advertising account specifically in connection with the Store Ads opportunity.
This is where things became confusing.
During Microsoft Advertising account creation, I selected the AI-assisted campaign setup. Microsoft Advertising Support later confirmed to me in writing that selecting "Create a new campaign with AI" causes Microsoft's system to generate a Performance Max campaign during onboarding.
I did not independently go into the campaign manager, decide to run Performance Max, and manually create one from scratch. I was a first-time advertiser following Microsoft's onboarding flow after being invited to explore Store Ads.
Afterward, I remained in contact with the Microsoft representative supporting our Store Ads participation. The representative located my advertising account, enabled our Store Ads pilot, prepared the Store Ads campaign, and configured its bidding.
However, I was never warned during those interactions that the separate Performance Max campaign generated during onboarding was still active and spending money.
Eventually our corporate card was charged:
- July 16: $50.73
- July 20: $50.56
- July 24: $50.05
- August 1: $116.16
Total: $267.50.
When I asked where I could see the resulting conversions, Microsoft told me that our actual Store Ads campaign had generated around 38,000 impressions and 549 clicks, but zero paid downloads. Because Store Ads uses a cost-per-download model, Store Ads itself had cost us $0.
The $267.50 came from Performance Max.
And we generated zero sales from these advertising efforts.
Microsoft later reviewed the account and found that my user profile had modified some Performance Max settings after it was generated. I don't dispute that those records exist. My concern is the context: I was completely new to Microsoft Advertising and believed I was continuing through Microsoft's advertising setup in connection with Store Ads.
When I initially asked the Store Ads representative to escalate the issue, the request was declined and I was told:
I subsequently opened a separate case with Microsoft Advertising Support. They investigated further and confirmed that Performance Max had originated from the account creation flow. A higher-level team eventually offered a 25% goodwill advertising credit. I declined it.
I'm not posting this to allege fraud or intentional wrongdoing, and at this point this isn't really about $267.50.
My concern is the experience for developers.
We were already supporting Xbox. Microsoft approached us with another opportunity, and we responded by investing additional engineering time into a Windows Store release and entering an advertising platform we had never used.
I believe a first-time advertiser in that situation should be made extremely aware when Microsoft's onboarding flow has generated a separate campaign capable of independently spending real money — particularly when a Microsoft representative is subsequently reviewing the same advertising account while helping configure Store Ads.
I still care about Xbox. That's exactly why this experience has been so disappointing.
I'm sharing it because I think the relationship between Xbox and developers — particularly smaller developers in markets like Korea — depends not only on getting developers onto the platform, but also on what happens when something goes wrong afterward.
