Ten New Titles, Critical Acclaim, and Exceptional Engagement Mark a Record Year for Xbox Game Studios
Today on the Xbox Wire Aaron Greenberg has posted an article lauding the 1st party output by Xbox Game Studios, and promised that “We’ll be sharing even more details on every game being fully optimized this holiday for the launch of Xbox Series X|S later this month, as well as showing more gameplay from these titles, so stay tuned for more.“
Mr. Greenberg’s blog post is copied below for your convenience.
I’m inspired by the dedication and extraordinary work across our many talented creative teams within Xbox Game Studios to launch a record number of first party games this year. In addition to a record-breaking year for games we’ve launched, many of these titles have earned strong critical acclaim, as well as impressive engagement from our fans:
- 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.
We remain in awe of everything our players have done, as we’ve seen some incredible in-game stats as well:
- 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%.
It’s been 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. Across four generations and thousands of games playable this holiday, this will be the largest launch lineup in the history of gaming. We’ll be sharing even more details on every game being fully optimized this holiday for the launch of Xbox Series X|S later this month, as well as showing more gameplay from these titles, so stay tuned for more.
Between our growing Xbox Game Studios teams, the massive influx of high-quality content from our new partners at Bethesda, and many more unannounced games in development, the future has never been brighter for Xbox gamers!
*Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition (Releasing on Oct. 15), 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 and Wasteland 3
