If, for whatever reason, you thought Microsoft's Black Friday offerings where somewhat lackluster...well, we've got good news.
Earlier today, Microsoft announced the latest version of its annual year-end sale, 'Countdown'. From a purely structural standpoint, the sale hasn't changed much over the years: Microsoft will put a few games up at a time, then switch them out a few days later. It's basically tradition at this point - considering it's one of Microsoft's best sales of the year, that's hardly a bad thing.
This year, however, things are different: instead of counting down to New Year's Day, the deals will continue to run all the way through Jan. 7, 2016, and will include both weekly and daily sales. On top of all that, this is easily the biggest sale to hit the Xbox platform ever - it honestly looks like Microsoft is trying to discount every game to ever hit its consoles.
No joke - everything from Halo 5: Guardians to Rise of the Tomb Raider to Batman: Arkham Knight to Destiny: The Taken King to Call of Duty: Black Ops III is on sale...and that's just a fraction of the first round of discounts.
To be fair, these aren't the biggest price gouges ever - expect to see a lot of 10% and 15% discounts on many of the more recent titles. Even so, the sheer number of different games is impressive: more than 90 titles across both Xbox One and Xbox 360 are on sale, and that's just for this week. With that many deals, it wouldn't be all that surprising to see a few sales continue on for more than one week, but is anyone really going to complain about getting a better chance at nabbing something on sale?
As an added bonus, Microsoft is also including daily sales from Dec. 22 until Dec. 31. These are where the big discounts start popping up: the first set of deals includes the Popcap Bundle, Need for Speed and Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit at 40%, 50% and 70% off respectively. The only downside is that the daily sales will be available for a limited time each day, but the relatively large discounts should help make up for the decreased availability.
The Countdown Xbox Sale begins on Dec. 22, and will run until Jan. 7, 2016. For the full (and massive) list of games on sale, head on over to Microsoft's official blog.
