Official HowLongToBeat Integration Is Long Overdue

thegamer.com:

This week, Microsoft integrated HowLongToBeat.com into the Xbox app on PC. The site, if you’re not familiar; does exactly what you would expect from the name: it tells you how long a game will take to beat, based on aggregate playtimes from participating players.

There’s a Main Story estimate, which applies to you if you tend to beeline through the campaign. If you want to finish the critical path and check off the major side content, you want to look at Main + Extras. If you wring a game out for all it’s worth, that’s Completionist. And if you just want to know how long it takes the average player to beat, All Styles is for you.

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I love this website. That may sound strange to say about something so functional. But I love it in the way you love a screwdriver if you need to put a bookshelf together, or WD-40 if you’re sick and tired of hearing your bathroom door squeal like an angry cat each time you swing it open. If you play a lot of games, HLTB is a necessity. So Microsoft officially implementing the website into its app is a welcome move. It’s also long overdue.

For as long as home video has been a widely accessible medium, a movie’s runtime has been included on the back of its packaging. This has also been integrated from the beginning of internet videos. Can you imagine clicking on a YouTube video and not being able to see its length?

This is obviously a little trickier to do for a game because it isn’t one set length. But that isn’t an insurmountable problem. HowLongToBeat.com’s format addresses this by offering four separate lengths. And given that studios frequently estimate the length of their games in interviews prior to