If you haven’t used it before, HowLongToBeat is a community run website where people can log how long it took them to beat a certain game. The times are then averaged to provide a rough estimate of the game’s expected length. It’s by no means sound scientifically, but it’s a nifty way of ballparking how much time you might need to finish a game’s story before you commit to playing (or buying) it. Microsoft has also recognised the usefulness of HowLomgToBeat and has partnered with the site to display its statistics in the Xbox app on PC, as announced through an official blog post. The averaged playtimes now appear on the details page for a game, where you can see times for the different categories logged by HowLongToBeat. The feature is available for “most PC Game Pass games” according to Microsoft. I went to check out how long it’s taken others to beat Yakuza 0. My first playthrough was definitely longer than the average of 31 hours calculated just for the main story, but I did spend an embarrassingly long amount of attempting to git gud at Mahjong. Clicking on View Details at the top right displayed times will take you to the HowLongToBeat website, where you can see the full breakdown on statistics and log your own times if you want. In a world full of live services and sprawling open-world games, it’s extremely useful to have some sort of benchmark of how long a game has taken others, even more so when you’ve got full-time commitments who and little time to spare.
