Game Pass now tells you how long a game takes to beat

rockpapershotgun.com:

The Xbox app now offers estimates for how long a Game Pass game might take you to beat, to help guide your decisions on what to play next. Integrating numbers from HowLongToBeat, most Game Pass games' pages now suggests how long a game is in several playstyles: finishing the main story; doing the main story and optional extras; and absolutely 100%ing everything. While I usually find talk of game length is tied into awful opinions that longer is better, I think this is great info to know on Game Pass.

Owned by mega-publisher Ziff Davis, HowLongToBeat is a crowdsourced site fed by users telling its database how many hours a game took them. It crunches these numbers to offer estimates for several playstyles, and now the Xbox app includes those numbers.

I think this is valuable info on Game Pass. While it does have a great lineup of fancy new releases, I find the service most useful for games I don't feel strongly enough about to buy but would enjoy checking out. It's a haven for good 7/10s and games someone once told they'd heard was good. I will often find myself wanting to play something new after work then ideally finish it in an evening or two. I will look at these length estimates when browsing the Game Pass catalogue.

I am not a fan of HLTB in general. The site says one of its purposes is to "see if a potential game purchase is worth your hard earned money" and I have often grumbled and rolled my eyes when someone pointed to it as proof that a game was bad or a rip-off or ughhhhh. Having often been so broke that I only played demos and mods, I fully understand needing to carefully manage an entertainment budget. But the 'value for money' metric grew wildly out of hand, and length somehow became a mark of quality. '£