Monday morning, Polygon tried to ez2kmt find the ads that were not skippable playing the game on the Xbox One. They weren't found in MyCareer, MyTeam or any of the Play Now matchups. It's possible to be temporary and is only affecting certain regions or versions of the game or 2K Sports may have already taken the ads off of the Play Now matches in the chaos of the weekend. We've spoken to an 2K representative to clarify the issue.

Stevivor said that the ads were available in the NBA 2K21's PC version as well as the PlayStation 4 version. NBA 2K20 began featuring unskippable ads in the last week of Halloween. NBA 2K19 trialed these ads during the summer months following its release, at the time it went for sale with a 95 percent discount. Both created backlashes that quickly ended.

In-game advertisements -- and not just fictitious billboards and actual sponsorships -- is nothing new. Madden NFL 10 began with it being available on the PlayStation 3 or Xbox 360. There were also an in-game bumper advertisement for Snickers 10 years ago.

EA Sports introduced unskippable advertisements in UFC 4 (and 2018's UFC 3) in the month of September. The UFC 4 launch was on August 4th, on Xbox One and Windows PC. EA later apologized to players and removed the advertisements.

While the publisher acknowledged that UFC's in-game advertising is not novel, he argued that it should have been announced to Buy MT 2K22 fighters before its inclusion.