It feels like every other week we learn of some new ridiculously high number involving the amount of hours people play games. Today is no different as some big figures are revealed about Xbox Game Studios titles.
General Manager, Xbox Games Marketing at Microsoft, Aaron Greenberg recently took to the official Xbox Wire blog to share these numbers, with the bullet points being:
- “15 Xbox Game Studios games launched to-date* (10 of which are brand new titles) and many more to come, a record for Xbox.
- 1.66 billion hours played by our fans and counting, the most ever year-to-date for Xbox Game Studios titles.
- Microsoft Flight Simulator, our longest running franchise, returned with an overall Metacritic score of 92, a top-rated PC game this year.
- Ori and the Will of the Wisps was the highest-rated Xbox game we launched this year with an average Metacritic score of 90.
- Grounded, a new release from Obsidian, quickly exceeded more than 1 million players, while Sea of Thieves has now surpassed 15 million players to date.
- Wasteland 3 not only was a fan-favorite and previously won the award for best RPG at gamescom, it also had an average Metacritic score of 86.
- In July at the Xbox Games Showcase we announced 5 new titles from Xbox Game Studios.”
Not to throw another list at you, but we need to address that asterisk in the first point above. Those 15 games are:
- Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition (Releasing on 15th October)
- Battletoads
- Bleeding Edge
- Gears Tactics
- Grounded
- Halo: Combat Evolved Anniversary on PC
- Halo 2 Anniversary on PC
- Halo 3 on PC
- Halo 3: ODST on PC
- Microsoft Flight Simulator
- Minecraft Dungeons
- Ori and the Will of the Wisps
- The Bard’s Tale Remastered
- Tell Me Why
- Wasteland 3
So let’s talk about that 1.66 billion hours number. By our napkin math that’s just shy of 70 million days, or 189 497 years. That’s a lot of game time, and we have to imagine that easy access to games on console and PC through Xbox Game Pass has been a big contributor to that.
While Greenberg doesn’t mention it, we’ve been speaking around the virtual office watercooler and access to Game Pass really destroys some barriers when it comes to casually trying out games that you may not have looked at before because of the price tag. On a personal level I’m hundreds of hours deep into Forza Horizon 4 exactly because of this.
Back to what Greenberg said and mention is made again of the high numbers players are pumping into Microsoft Flight Simulator. We wrote about some of this in early September and it seems people are still going at it.
Greenberg calls 2020, “a tremendous year so far, and it’s going to get even better with the launch of Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S on November 10”.
With the rest of the year still uncertain because of the ongoing pandemic we’ll need to wait until 1st January 2021 to properly reflect on that comment.
[Image – CC geralt on Pixabay]
