With the release of the Xbox Series S and X due on November 10th, Microsoft's general manager of Xbox marketing Aaron Greenberg penned a blog post on Xbox Wire to describe 2020 as a 'record year' for Xbox Game Studios. The first-party teams have released several acclaimed games while announcing others - and that's not considering the recent acquisition of Bethesda, which greatly expanded Xbox Game Studios.

　　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. 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.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. 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%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.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.With the latest acquisitions, Xbox Game Studios will undeniably be a threat to SIE Worldwide Studios when it comes to both quantity and quality of first-party output. The good news is that gamers will reap the rewards of this fierce competition.