Welcome to The Xbox Guide. This is a passion project born from a desire to capture the wealth of data and stats out there about Xbox games, particularly in relation to Game Pass, and present it in a (hopefully) interesting manner.
There is a gap at the moment in the discourse around Xbox and Xbox Game Pass, whereby lots of speculation takes place about various topics without much basis to back it up. Microsoft are very reluctant to divulge any useful information about performance other than what they are obliged to release (financial figures). Sites such as the excellent TrueAchievements aim to fill in some of the gaps, but the Xbox Guide is looking to use official data where available, particularly regarding most played games and review scores. We will never be able to get anything regarding sales numbers or active users, but we can make some assumptions based on the available data. Keep an eye out for several features in the future tackling some of the biggest misconceptions about Xbox.
The website is a spiritual successor to another Xbox-focused site started in the original Xbox era, TGSN.co.uk. This was partly one of the largest (possibly the largest) Xbox gaming clans, with over 200 members, but also a home to multi-platform reviews, features and news articles. I (Mike Hazleton), founded that website and ran it for many years with my very best friend, Jonathan Garrett (now running an equally successful endeavour in the gaming space @ Burly Bird Media), and am delighted to be re-entering that space with what is hopefully a similarly unique concept.
We also like to do things with a bit of a sense of humour (hence The Phil Tracker). It is never our intention to offend or belittle the work of any of the fantastic developers and games industry employees out there – the aim is to inform and entertain so please feed back if you feel anything doesn’t quite land as intended.
A final note: the site is currently in its infancy. Some things may not look quite right and there are lots of features we want to add, including:
– Message board/Discord server
– Comparison metrics with PS Plus
– Top lists (e.g. top 10 Game Pass games by various metrics)
– More Xbox execs / famous gamertags to track (e.g. The Booty Tracker)
– Game Pass metrics visualisation over time (e.g. value going up or down)
– Previews, reviews, features and video content
– Speed & reliability improvements
– Improvements to filter out similar news articles from the aggregator (i.e. when two websites cover the same topic)
Please bear with us as we get set up and iron out the kinks. See you around the website 🙂
Mike Hazleton
Enquiries/Partnerships/Feedback gratefully received via mike@thexboxguide.com