Microsoft's Xbox team has revealed some of the numbers it has collected on the response to its gaming announcements during E3 2016 earlier in June.
Microsoft used the gaming trade show to make a number of gaming announcements for the Xbox One and Windows 10, including the reveal of the upcoming smaller Xbox One S console and a teaser of the "Project Scorpio" console which will be launched in late 2017. In a post on the Xbox Wire site, Mike Nichols, the Corporate Vice President of Marketing for the Xbox division, stated:
Your passion and feedback is what fuels us and helps us make Xbox a great place for everyone to play, and we were blown away with your record-breaking response to the news and vision we shared at the show.
Nichols revealed a number of stats Microsoft had collected during and after E3 2016:
- The Xbox E3 2016 Briefing was viewed over 6.6M times, an increase of 78% over last year and our most viewed live event to date.
- During the week of E3, videos shared on the Xbox YouTube channel were viewed over 27M times, a massive increase of 184% over E3 2015.
- Xbox received hundreds of E3 award nominations and wins from global outlets including IGN, Game Informer, Toronto Sun (CA), USA Today, Atomix (MX) and Polygon.
- In excess of 340,000 unique, customized controllers were created and saved in the all-new Xbox Design Lab.
- The "Friendly Update" for Minecraft that delivered Minecraft Realms to mobile and Windows 10 devices, has seen over 4M people play together across Minecraft: Pocket Edition and Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition via Xbox Live.
- Over 4M friendships were forged and 90M hours of multiplayer were played on Xbox Live during the week of E3 – that's more friends than the whole population of Panama and over 10,000 years of consecutive gaming.
- The response to the Halo Wars 2 Beta exceeded expectations with over 1M matches played, totaling more than 2M gameplay hours. The data and feedback gathered will play a crucial role in the development of the game, ensuring Halo Wars 2 is the RTS for everyone when it launches on Feb. 21, 2017.
- In excess of 2M fans engaged with the newly launched Xbox Snapchat channel, checking out exclusive updates from the show floor and behind-the-scenes demos.
- On Twitter, #XboxE3 was tweeted over 400K times throughout the course of E3, trended as the #1 topic worldwide for over an hour and a half, and was the most tweeted of any Xbox hashtag.
Microsoft also added that gamers have spent over 100 million hours playing Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One since the console's backwards compatible features were launched in November 2015.
