What you need to know
- Microsoft’s end-of-year Xbox celebrations have begun.
- Like previous years, Microsoft has collected data on your gaming and is showcasing it on a nice website.
- I played far too much Elden Ring, although STALKER 2 is rapidly climbing up the ranks.
It’s the end of the year, which means big companies get a chance to showcase all the big data they’ve collected on your habits.
Things like Spotify Wrapped helped popularize the trend, and now many many platforms get involved at the end of the year to showcase statistics on your habits and activities through their platforms. Microsoft itself is no stranger, particularly with Xbox. The huge amounts of telemetry data gaming companies collect to figure out how to better build games is also pretty useful for building features like this, as Microsoft showcased today.
Head here to grab a look at your Xbox Year In Review, and sign in with your Microsoft account. Therein, Microsoft will showcase the top three games you played, and give you some insights into your habits, and how you stacked up against other players.
For example, Elden Ring was by far my most-played game this year, thanks to Shadow of the Erdtree no doubt. The massive expansion absorbed dozens upon dozens of my gametime hours while I searched out every single boss and mini boss to vanquish on my quest to vanquish Miquella. According to Microsoft’s stats, only 13.9% of Xbox players actually landed the achievement to become Elden Lord, which means a lot of you reading this are statistically unlikely to have maidens.
Interestingly, Microsoft also broke down playtime hours by mobile, PC, and cloud for the first time. My gametime on console was almost 500 hours this year, with PC, mobile, and cloud taking up around 100. Thankfully, Microsoft doesn’t yet have any data on my Battle.net account displayed here, where they would see that I’d spent well over 1000 hours in World of Warcraft this year alone… don’t judge me.
Microsoft also broke down my genre preferences as such: 47% Action & Adventure, 26% Role playing, 22% Shooter, 3% Strategy, 2% Other. According to Microsoft, I am in the top 10% of Xbox players for playtime, top 3% for achievements earned and gamerscore, which is quite a surprise to me. I suppose there’s a lot of new accounts out there sitting on 0 to 1000 gamerscore coming into the platform for the first time with Call of Duty Black Ops 6 hitting Xbox Game Pass, huh.
What did your Xbox year look like?
It was a strange year for Microsoft. This time last year, rumors began to swirl that Microsoft was going to start putting its games onto PlayStation, which led to questions of Microsoft’s long-term commitment to Xbox console hardware. Yet, with Steam looking to curate and build its own “console-like” SteamOS hardware, with both Xbox and PlayStation exclusives, the idea of “console exclusive” is going to look very weird over the next few years.
Microsoft had an absolutely stellar Xbox Showcase 2024, giving users hope that it has finally turned the corner on its first-party issues as we move into 2025, with games like Fable, South of Midnight, and Avowed all looking strong. Microsoft also fixed a lot of its issues with third-party publishers, with Square Enix’s Final Fantasy games, and Capcom’s classic fighting games hitting Xbox. We also got a few long-time PlayStation exclusives hopping across to Xbox, in the form of Death Stranding and Genshin Impact. Microsoft has wrapped up the year nicely with games like STALKER 2, Call of Duty Black Ops 6, and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle doing the heavy lifting.
Despite jitters about Xbox’s priorities and intentions, it affirms that it is working on new Xbox console hardware, and even an Xbox handheld for the future. But what the Xbox landscape looks like in the next 5-10 years is anyone’s guess, as studio closures, evolving user habits, and decreased consumer spending disrupt what previously seemed like a very healthy and stable industry.
