Aaron Greenberg, General Manager of Xbox Games Marketing at Microsoft, took some time to celebrate a “record year” for Xbox Game Studios on Xbox Wire. It has been a spectacular year for Xbox Game Studios, especially with Microsoft’s recent acquisition of ZeniMax Media for $7.5 billion. As we collectively count down the days to the release of the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S on November 10th, Greenberg looks at all the things that Microsoft and Xbox Game Studios have accomplished over the past year.
- 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, Microsoft announced 5 new titles from Xbox Game Studios.
Besides all the great Xbox Game Studios announcements, the Xbox community has achieved some amazing in-game stats on Xbox One and Windows PC on Xbox Game Pass.
- Microsoft Flight Simulator players have already logged over 26 million flights and more than a billion miles flown, which averages out to 15 times more than the number of real-life flights taken globally each day in 2019, and enough miles to circumnavigate the globe over 40,000 times.
- Minecraft Dungeons has become a co-op favorite, with 6.9 million multiplayer sessions over the past two months, nearly two-thirds of which (4.4 million) were couch co-op.
- More than 500 million bugs have been squashed in Grounded, but there are over 10 quintillion insects in the world so we’ve only exterminated 0.000000000005%.
Starting on November 10, 2020, Microsoft will release its next-generation Xbox consoles with the Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. Xbox Game Studios will continue to crank out Xbox game exclusives to Xbox Game Pass and add to its already robust game offerings via Xbox Backward Compatibility. It is going to be hard for other competitors, including Sony to offer the best place for gamers when Microsoft owns most of the game studios and makes the decision on whether or not to release certain games on their platform.
