Microsoft Boasts About Xbox's Big Year Ahead Of Xbox Series X And Series S

Right now all eyes are on the next generation of Xbox, Series X and Series S. But before those new consoles arrive in force, Microsoft took a moment to pat itself on the back for the last year of games on its current-gen system, Xbox One.

An Xbox Wire post from Microsoft's Aaron Greenberg outlined a few milestones from this year on Xbox. Among those, the company set a new record for first-party games with 15 Xbox Game Studios games launched this year, 10 of which were entirely new games. He also boasted that players have put 1.66 billion hours into Xbox Game Studios games this year.

Greenberg also gave a few notes on particular games. Microsoft Flight Simulator and Ori and the Will of the Wisps both received 90+ ratings on GameSpot sister site Metacritic, and Wasteland 3 came in not far behind with an 86 and won Best RPG at Gamescom. Grounded has hit more than 1 million players while Sea of Thieves has surpassed 15 million to date. Microsoft Flight Simulator isn't' available on Xbox consoles yet, and Ori and the Will of the Wisps eventually released on Nintendo Switch, as well.

Finally, the company shared a few fun stats about some of its biggest games. Microsoft Flight Simulator has logged 26 million flights and more than a billion miles flown, which is 15 times the number of actual daily flights taken in 2019. Minecraft Dungeons has had 6.9 million multiplayer sessions in the last two months, and 2/3 of those were couch co-op. And Grounded players have squashed 500 million creepy crawlers, but that only represents a tiny fraction (0.000000000005%) of estimated insects in the whole (real) world.

Of the games highlighted, Grounded is the lone one in early access. That comes from Obsidian Entertainment, which also made The Outer Worlds. No final release target has been set for Grounded yet, but it got off to a very big start. Though not early access, Sea of Thieves was a similarly live game from Rare that has gotten a steady stream of updates throughout its life.

Of course, the new generation is backward compatible with the old one, so all of these games (except Flight Simulator, which is PC-only for now) will run even better on Xbox Series X and Series S. Our Xbox Series X hands-on impressions found that the faster loading times and Quick Resume features are big quality-of-life improvements, even if the new gen isn't coming with big weird ideas. Waiting times are cut down by as much as 80%, meaning you can spend more time playing.

Both Xbox Series X and Xbox Series X are coming on November 10. Preorders have been snatched up quickly whenever they become available, so if you're still looking for one keep an eye on our Xbox Series X and Series S preorder guides.