Microsoft releases its E3 2016 press conference statistics

Microsoft’s E3 2016 conference was arguably the best of the bunch due to the reveal of the Xbox One S and the announcement of Project Scorpio. While the games weren’t that exciting, they were good enough to whet our appetite and keep us interested in what Microsoft has in store.

Now, Microsoft wants to reinforce the success of its conference, which is why the company is releasing its statistics for E3 2016. Mike Nichols, Corporate Vice President of Marketing for Xbox, recently blogged about the conference and shared some data that many will find quite interesting.

Here’s the full rundown:

• The Xbox E3 2016 Briefing was viewed over 6.6M times, an increase of 78% over last year and our most viewed live event to date.
• During the week of E3, videos shared on the Xbox YouTube channel were viewed over 27M times, a massive increase of 184% over E3 2015.
• Xbox received hundreds of E3 award nominations and wins from global outlets including IGN, Game Informer, Toronto Sun (CA), USA Today, Atomix (MX) and Polygon.
• In excess of 340,000 unique, customized controllers were created and saved in the all-new Xbox Design Lab.
• The “Friendly Update” for Minecraft that delivered Minecraft Realms to mobile and Windows 10 devices, has seen over 4M people play together across Minecraft: Pocket Edition and Minecraft: Windows 10 Edition via Xbox Live.
• Over 4M friendships were forged and 90M hours of multiplayer were played on Xbox Live during the week of E3 – that’s more friends than the whole population of Panama and over 10,000 years of consecutive gaming.
• The response to the Halo Wars 2 Beta exceeded expectations with over 1M matches played, totaling more than 2M gameplay hours.  The data and feedback gathered will play a crucial role in the development of the game, ensuring Halo Wars 2 is the RTS for everyone when it launches on Feb. 21, 2017.
• In excess of 2M fans engaged with the newly launched Xbox Snapchat channel, checking out exclusive updates from the show floor and behind-the-scenes demos.
• On Twitter, #XboxE3 was tweeted over 400K times throughout the course of E3, trended as the #1 topic worldwide for over an hour and a half, and was the most tweeted of any Xbox hashtag.

The new Xbox One S will start at$299, however, that version won’t hit stores until in December of 2016. The $399 version will be ready by August of this year, and will come with a 2TB hard drive. As for Project Scorpio, the console is set for a 2017 release date.

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