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

Resident Evil Village

The Resident Evil series has seen its fair share of remakes in the form of the stellar Resident Evil 2 and the disappointing Resident Evil 3, but it has consistently delivered high-quality follow-ups. These include Resident Evil 7 and its follow-up Village, the latter of which represent the best of what the series offers. Resident Evil Village majestically swerves from one kind of horror to the next without any hiccups, and the action keeps pace with the changing scenery and shifting mechanics. The core gameplay of shooting down zombies is much faster than Resident Evil 7, but it retains the heft and groundedness of a survival horror game that comes together to make it one of the best in its class.

PS4 subscribers gain access to Kingdom Hearts HD 1.5 + 2.5 ReMIX, Kingdom Hearts HD 2.8 Final Chapter Prologue, Kingdom Hearts 3 and Kingdom Hearts: Melody of Memory. There’s also Tom Clancy’s The Division 2, Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon Breakpoint, and What Remains of Edith Finch. Rounding out the line-up of PS4 titles is Earth Defense Force: World Brothers, Earth Defense Force: Iron Rain and Onee Chanbara Origin.

PlayStation Plus Premium subscribers also gain access to five classic Ratchet and Clank titles on PS3. These are Ratchet and Clank, Ratchet and Clank 2: Going Commando, Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal, Ratchet and Clank: Deadlocked, and Ratchet and Clank Future: Tools of Destruction. For details on the PlayStation Plus Essential titles available for November, head here.

No Man’s Sky

Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky was a complicated case. With its initial reveal, the developer unveiled large alien creatures and a fairly dense planet teeming with wildlife. Enormous fleets and epic space battles were teased in screenshots leading up to launch. In comparison, the final game felt kind of empty. Those massive animals and epic space battles were almost no where to be seen. Procedural generation could be blamed for some of that and No Man’s Sky did have some pretty stunning vistas. They were just far from what the trailers before it had promised. Fortunately, Hello Games has been heavily supporting the game after launch and given us incredible forests, the potential to build massive bases and vastly improved visuals overall.

Left 4 Dead 2

While Left 4 Dead blazed a trail for co-op shooter titles – especially those with AI directors and hordes of enemies punctuated by special units – Left 4 Dead 2 offered that and more. More weapons, more variety in objective play and arguably tighter map design meshed well with the responsive shooting, expanded melee weapons and new Special Infected. Furthermore, with all the mods available – from character models like Lollipop Chainsaw’s Juliet to maps like the Battle of Helm’s Deep from Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers – there’s near endless replay value here.

Are you on the edge of checking out the popular multiplayer tactical shooter, Rainbow Six Siege, but just aren’t sure about dropping the money because of the rocky launch? Between Thursday, February 15 and Tuesday, February 20 you can look forward to checking out the game for free on whatever your platform of choice.

Specifically, PC players can enjoy the free play weekend on Origin February 15-18, PS4 players can check it out the longest from February 15-20, and Xbox One players can jump in from February 15-19. If you enjoy yourself, progress can be carried over to a purchased version of the game besides the starter edition.

Just after the free play weekend, PC players can check out the new Outbreak mode ahead of time on a test server beginning February 20th, well ahead of its launch on all other platforms sometime between March and early April. Ubisoft recently announced plans to incorporate loot boxes to the Outbreak event and up the price of the game, but backtracked later.

Several years out from launch, and Ubisoft is making major monetization changes to Rainbow Six Siege now that it’s out there. Firstly, with the ‘Outbreak’ event coming for four weeks this spring, Ubisoft is introducing Outbreak packs, or as they don’t want you to call them, loot boxes. Ubisoft promises that there will be no duplicates, so if you get 50 loot boxes, you’ll have the 50 unique “just cosmetic” items. So players who want all the cosmetics can either earn 15,000 R6 Credits, or buy them at $115 (after the four free packs for logging in).

Secondly, Ubisoft is dropping the $40 standard edition of the game from the retail market. The remaining options for new player will start at $60 Advanced edition, which includes 10 of those Outbreak packs. You’ll still get the Outbreak packs if you buy following the event if you purchase late.

Finally, in a Twitter reply to this announcement, the official Rainbow Six Siege Twitter account teased that PlayStation 4 Pro and Xbox One X support are being worked on, though without an ETA. In other news, Ubisoft also added loot boxes to Ghost Recon Wildlands earlier this week.

This is definitely on our road map! We do not have an ETA for it though.

— Rainbow Six Siege (@Rainbow6Game) January 25, 2018

Ubisoft’s surprisingly popular tactical shooter, Rainbow Six Siege has, as many ongoing titles do, new exploits being discovered all the time. A particularly annoying one which has been inflicting players for awhile should be receiving a PC patch within the next week, but console players will have to suffer along for awhile longer.

The exploit, which allows players to equip a ballistic shield to one of the character’s head with some minor thumb gymnastics, for obvious reasons seriously unbalances the game. Ubisoft has released a statement saying they’re almost ready to drop a fix on PC, but according to the developer and publisher, the PS4 and Xbox One patch is out of their hands at this point in the year. Console players can now expect the fix to drop with the next major patch. Since the latest season just began with the Operation White Noise DLC last month, the patch could be months out.

While players continue to struggle with the bug, they can also look forward to the upcoming year 3 of content for the game, of which you can get the season pass right now for $30. Are you still enjoying Rainbow Six Siege? Let us know in the comments.

A new season and the upcoming “White Noise” expansion is helping Ubisoft keep the Rainbow Six Siege train chugging along, with players looking forward to a new map and new operators. In a recent teaser trailer, the new playable operator, Zofia has been revealed to the waiting masses in a new operator trailer.

Zofia brings along a double-barrelled grenade launcher that can shake things up and tear right through walls much like another operator, Ash. The grenades she fires, which we see a little bit of as she observes her disassembled weapon over a lighted table, will be concussive as well, knocking players around like her sister Ela’s weapon of choice, trip mines.

While Zofia does borrow her wall busting move from Ash, her play style is expected to be more methodical and calculated with 2 armour and 2 speed. Test servers will get their hands on her as of November 20th, but you can see the teaser below.

Rainbow Six Siege’s next update, Season Four is due to be out later this month. The new season will bring with it a new map titled Mok Myeok Tower, new weapons and three new operators. It seems that Ubisoft had leaked information unintentionally when they uploaded a post revealing information about the hacker operative Grace “Dokkaebi” Nam. While the post has since been removed, YouTuber corecross saved the post and discusses the new operative in his video.

As a hacker, we can expect that Grace will try and turn opponents’ items against them. This would make her a useful ally and a dangerous foe. In the post, she’s described as follows, “She was always a D.I.Y. type of personality , and what she couldn’t get her hands on, she built.” It will be interesting to see her building ability in action. We also have to wait and see what her mysterious “special ability” is and how it works. Her equipment includes the MK14 EBR Marksman rifle or the BOSG 12.2 Shotgun for primary weapons and the C75 Auto and SMG-12 MPs as her secondary weapons.

More information will be revealed during the Pro League Finals on November 18^th and 19^th so we should get to know more about this operative soon enough.