Software and tech giant Microsoft has said that this year has been record-breaking for titles from its first-party Xbox Game Studios.

In a blog post, the Big M's GM of games marketing Aaron Greenberg (pictured) said that these developers had launched 15 titles – 10 of which were new titles – while consumers had spent 1.66bn hours playing these releases.

This comes in the wake of Microsoft buying the parent company of Bethesda, ZeniMax, for $7.5bn in September. The deal brought the total number of developers in the Xbox Game Studios stable to 23.

"It’s been a tremendous year so far, and it’s going to get even better with the launch of Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S on November 10," Greenberg wrote.

"Across four generations and thousands of games playable this holiday, this will be the largest launch lineup in the history of gaming. We’ll be sharing even more details on every game being fully optimised this holiday for the launch of Xbox Series X|S later this month, as well as showing more gameplay from these titles, so stay tuned for more.

"Between our growing Xbox Game Studios teams, the massive influx of high-quality content from our new partners at Bethesda, and many more unannounced games in development, the future has never been brighter for Xbox gamers."