The post is a the latest iteration of the Xbox Excellence Awards, which was created last year to celebrate how players engaged with various releases on Xbox. The Store Rating category lists 2025 games with the best ratings on the Microsoft Store, with an added requirement of the title having at least 500 ratings. Player Engagements is about the average number of hours spent on a game by each player within the first six weeks of a game’s release. Daily Active Users celebrates titles, expansions or updates with the highest single-day active users throughout the year. And finally Units Sold is fairly self-explanatory.

Going down the lists, you’ll find many of the biggest releases of the year, from ARC Raiders and Battlefield 6, as well as award-winning RPG Clair Obscur: Expedition 33. Indie titles have also been well-represented, with games like Crime Scene Cleaner and Satisfactory making it into the lists. There also doesn’t seem to have been a singular genre to dominate the lists, since everything from sports games like EA Sports Madden NFL 26, to fantasy adventure life sims like Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time, and even fighting games like Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics are well represented.

Curiously, none of the games was present in all four of the categories. At most, we got to see titles like Borderlands 4 being able to make it on to three of them: Player Engagement, Daily Active Users and Units Sold. Even ARC Raiders, which has seen quite a bit of success, is only on the Units Sold and Daily Active Users lists.

Microsoft has also emphasized that the lists represent a diverse collection of games developed by studios of varying sizes. All in all, it represents 48 unique developers based out of 13 countries, with 24 publishers having had a hand in their release. 19 of the games were self-published. “Taken as a whole, it’s an encapsulation of development on Xbox – we want gaming to reach you wherever you are, and for the teams making those games to find you from wherever they are,” wrote the company.

Full list of games:

Store Rating:

• Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
• Clair Obscur: Expedition 33
• Crime Scene Cleaner
• Demon Slayer -Kimetsu no Yaiba- The Hinokami Chronicles 2
• Digimon Story: Time Stranger
• Dreamcore
• Dynasty Warriors: Origins
• Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
• Final Fantasy XVI
• Lies of P: Overture
• Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
• Little Nightmares III
• Marvel vs. Capcom Fighting Collection: Arcade Classics
• Minami Lane
• Mullet MadJack
• Poppy Playtime Chapter 4
• Satisfactory
• Silent Hill 2
• Sonic Racing: CrossWorlds
• The First Berserker: Khazan

Player Engagement:

• Borderlands 4
• Digimon Story: Time Stranger
• Dynasty Warriors: Origins
• EA Sports College Football 26
• EA Sports FC 26
• Elden Ring Nightreign
• Fantasy Life i: The Girl Who Steals Time
• Farm Together 2
• Final Fantasy Tactics – The Ivalice Chronicles
• Helldivers 2
• Inazuma Eleven: Victory Road
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
• Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii
• MLB The Show 25
• Monster Hunter Wilds
• NBA 2K26
• NHL 26
• Rust
• Satisfactory
• The First Berserker: Khazan

Daily Active Users:

• Arc Raiders
• Avowed
• Battlefield 6
• Borderlands 4
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
• DOOM: The Dark Ages
• Elden Ring Nightreign
• Fortnite
• Forza Horizon 5
• Grand Theft Auto V
• Grounded 2
• Helldivers 2
• Marvel Rivals
• Minecraft
• NBA 2K26
• Rematch
• Roblox
• Rocket League
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege

Units Sold:

• Arc Raiders
• Assassin’s Creed Shadows
• Battlefield 6
• Borderlands 4
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 7
• EA Sports Madden NFL 26
• EA Sports College Football 26
• EA Sports FC 26
• Elden Ring Nightreign
• Grand Theft Auto V
• Helldivers 2
• Hollow Knight: Silksong
• Kingdom Come: Deliverance II
• MLB The Show 25
• Monster Hunter Wilds
• NBA 2K26
• PGA Tour 2K25
• Ready or Not
• The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered
• WWE 2K25

Wolfenstein: The New Order

While its sequel got a little too lost in the cinematic sauce (not that it’s a bad thing), MachineGames’ first crack at the Wolfenstein series felt just right in its delivery of story and bloody action. Sure, there’s also plenty of stealth play, but when it came down to steamrolling over hordes of enemies, dual-wielding assault rifles and chunking away with the shotgun, it was a visceral breath of fresh air.

March 5th marks the arrival of Galacticare, a hospital management sim with a space-faring twist, Game Pass Standard. It will be playable on Xbox Series X/S. On March 6th, One Lonely Outpost goes live for cloud, consoles, and PC on Game Pass Ultimate and PC Game Pass.

Rogue-lite bullet hell title Enter the Gungeon arrives on March 11th for cloud, consoles, and PC via all three tiers. And finally, there’s Mullet Madjack, a rogue-lite first-person shooter with over-the-top retro-futuristic action, coming to March 13th for Xbox Series X/S, cloud, and PC.

Several titles will also leave the service on March 15th. Check out the list below:

• Evil West (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Lies of P (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• No More Heroes 3 (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Solar Ash (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• SpongeBob SquarePants: Battle for Bikini Bottom – Rehydrated (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Yakuza 5 Remastered (Cloud, Console, and PC)
• Yakuza 6: The Song of Life (Cloud, Console, and PC)

The First Descendant

Kicking things off with free to play third-person looter shooter The First Descendant, this co-operative RPG tasks teams of up to four with saving humanity from a string of hostile invaders. It harbours everything you could ever want in a modern-day shooter: flashy gunplay, intricate visuals, and a varied cast of colourful characters each with unique skills and capabilities. However, there are problems in its frustratingly slow progression, non-existent story, and atrocious balancing. Sort these issues out and The First Descendant could achieve some longevity in what is becoming an increasingly challenging domain.