Xbox Game Studios shared some statistics on its recent titles yesterday, and it seems that Microsoft's gaming division has had a pretty solid year. The company says that its games have racked up 1.66 billion hours of playtime in 2020, and the development studios within the Xbox family have launched 15 titles since the division rebranded from the Microsoft Studios name in 2019.
Microsoft didn't waste the opportunity to tout some of its recent successes, pointing to Microsoft Flight Simulator as its highest-rated title of the year on Metacritic with a score of 92. Other Xbox games like Ori and the Will of the Wisps and Wasteland 3 weren't far behind, scoring a 92 and an 86 on the aggregation site.
Xbox-owned studio Obsidian also shared some info on early access survival game Grounded. More than 1 million players have tried the shrunken-down adventure since it launched this summer, with 500 million creepy-crawly enemies defeated in its massive backyard setting. Rare's multiplayer pirate romp Sea of Thieves, meanwhile, has scored over 15 million players over the past two years. Both games seem to be strong use cases for an Xbox Game Pass subscription: good with friends, easy to pick up and play, and made by studios with dedicated fan communities.
The company's upcoming batch of titles for 2021 includes Halo Infinite, which was originally supposed to launch alongside the new Xbox consoles but received a delay after fan backlash, as well as games like Hellblade II, Psychonauts 2 and a revival of the Fable series from Forza Horizon studio Playground Games.
The news on the state of Xbox Game Studios comes as Microsoft continues to expand the division with new developers. One of the Xbox One's biggest flaws was arguably a lack of interesting exclusive titles, and the company has gone to great lengths to ensure that the same won't be true of the Xbox Series X and S, buying out well-known developers like Ninja Theory and Double Fine and founding new studios like The Initiative.
Microsoft's acquisition spree reached a new peak at the end of September with the surprise announcement that Xbox Game Studios was buying Bethesda, bringing hits like The Elder Scrolls, Fallout and Doom under the same roof as Halo, Forza and Gears of War. Without much in the way of rumors or word that Bethesda's parent company ZeniMax was interested in selling, the move came as a shock to the industry.
It remains to be seen how the Xbox Game Studios merger will affect announced future games like Starfield and The Elder Scrolls 6, but it's possible that some Bethesda titles could still be multiplatform after the buyout. Deathloop and Ghostwire Tokyo will still keep their timed exclusive windows on the PlayStation 5, but only time will tell what else the publisher has cooking that could be limited to Xbox consoles and PCs.
Source: Xbox Wire