Drum please
Broadly speaking, this has been a year of silver plating. It’s the only way to stay healthy. If you focus exclusively on all the ways our lives have been turned upside down in 2020, you will be devastated to sleep 18 hours a day. Everyone should take the positive aspects and appreciate the things that bring them joy. That’s why I’m happy to say: This year, surprisingly and against all odds, it was really pretty fantastic for video games.
You may have heard that there are new consoles. That’s not a big point of emphasis here, as the exclusive titles in the Xbox Series X aren’t a big point of emphasis for Microsoft. Instead, everything works between generations, while it simply works better in the X series. It means that the best things about Xbox were released mostly earlier this year. (Although backward compatibility is such an important Xbox feature, I’m told I can’t apply Forza Horizon 4 for 2020 GOTY.)
It’s not a next-generation showcase, but it’s mostly an Xbox Game Pass showcase. Almost everything here (five of the seven games, according to my account) is available for Game Pass subscribers to download and play on consoles, PCs, or their mobile devices via cloud streaming. Of course what is important for Microsoft. Not how many people buy consoles, but how many people pay continuously to be part of this ecosystem. To its credit, Microsoft has created a value proposition that people want to take advantage of.
To do so, no, none of these games are genuine Xbox exclusive. Microsoft’s commitment to PC support through Play Anywhere made Xbox exclusives go the way of Dodo years ago. Besides Shock, all games here are first hand, in Game Pass or are wrapped in some sort of exclusivity offer. This is a much better position than in previous years, in which the Xbox category was largely: “Here’s a two-part game, and then a bunch of things that didn’t fit anywhere else, but that should to be represented somewhere “.
Here are the nominees for Best Destructoid Xbox Game of 2020:
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