Skip to main content

PC Game Pass will now tell you how long it takes to beat games on the service

Microsoft is integrating data from the website How Long To Beat into Game Pass. The company announced its partnership with the IGN-owned website Wednesday, saying it will update the Xbox app on Windows to give Game Pass subscribers time estimates on the game details pages for most of the service’s titles on PC.

How Long To Beat is a community-driven website that specializes in calculating the amount of time it takes to play through games, depending on your playstyle. If you just want to get through the main story for Death Stranding, for example, it will take you 40 hours to see the credits roll. If you’re a completionist and want to finish the main story, side quests, and unlock every single achievement the game has to offer, it will take you 113 hours (which is a little less than five days) to achieve 100% completion.

The Death Stranding details screen displays How Long To Beat information in the Xbox app on PC.
Microsoft

In addition to seeing playtime details upon clicking View Details, users will be able to submit their own times and see community reviews, playthrough notes, and data breakdowns based on playstyle and platform. They’ll also have the ability to organize their game library and help other players clear their backlog.

Recommended Videos

To help gamers play games on Game Pass even faster, Microsoft also improved the performance of the Xbox app.

Please enable Javascript to view this content

“With the most recent update, the app now launches up to 15% faster, and we’ve also made some fixes for overall better responsiveness when you interact with key experiences in the app,” said Jason Beaumont, Xbox’s partner director of product management for player experiences and platform. “We’ve seen crash-free sessions improve to 99.9%, and player reports of games that didn’t download or didn’t install successfully reduced by nearly half.”

The integration of How Long To Beat into Game Pass is a welcome change for players with busy lives. The website already shares completion times for the latest games on Twitter, so sharing those times on Game Pass titles will be even more helpful.

Cristina Alexander
Cristina Alexander is a gaming and mobile writer at Digital Trends. She blends fair coverage of games industry topics that…
How long is Indiana Jones and the Great Circle?
Indiana drawing a circle in red.

We've had plenty of Indiana Jones games in the past, but none in any modern generation until now. Indiana Jones and the Great Circle is the last great Xbox Series X game of 2024 and promises an adventure on par with the films we fell in love with. Adventure games such as this don't tend to be particularly long, though, leading some to wonder whether this game will be much longer than the films. Thankfully, that isn't the case, but you should still know what you're getting into before picking the game up or subscribing to Game Pass to check it out. Let's solve the riddle of how long it takes to beat Indiana Jones and the Great Circle.
How long is Indiana Jones and the Great Circle?

Pinning down how long this adventure will take you is a bit of a puzzle. While Indiana Jones and the Great Circle isn't an open-world game, it is by no means linear and there are tons of collectibles, side uests, and optional mysteries to solve. Depending on how thorough you want to be, that can double your playtime, or possibly triple it.

Read more
3 new Xbox Game Pass games you should play this weekend
Aliens: Dark Descent key art.

It's Black Friday weekend, so there's a good chance that you just picked up an Xbox Series X or Xbox Series S and are planning to subscribe to Xbox Game Pass Ultimate or Standard. If so, you'll need to decide what you should play first. While first-party games like Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 or Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 are good choices, some other new Xbox Game Pass titles are also worth your time this weekend.
Aliens: Dark Descent

If you've been on an Aliens kick this year thanks to Alien: Romulus and the announcement that Alien Isolation is finally getting a sequel, then you'll want to check out Aliens: Dark Descent. This is a real-time strategy game where players control a small squad of Colonial Marines dispatched to Planet Lethe to take care of a Xenomorph threat. It's a tense, exhilarating title that finds a middle ground between the bombastic shootouts of Aliens: Fireteam Elite and the quiet horror of Alien: Isolation. Aliens: Dark Descent flew under the radar when it launched last year, so I'm happy it has another chance at notoriety by getting added to Game Pass.

Read more
Game spending is up — and you can thank Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
A soldier shooting a beamshamsher in Black Ops 6.

Most of us knew that Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 would be one of the biggest games of the year, but it's so big that it's doing a lot to boost games sales across the U.S.

This information comes from Circana (formerly NPD Group), which publishes a monthly report on U.S. video game spending. According to analyst Mat Piscatella, spending on hardware, software, and accessories was up 10% in October compared to the same time last year, and the spike was "primarily" driven by the release of Black Ops 6. Non-mobile video game subscription service spending was also up by 16%.

Read more