2025 was an incredible year for gaming and, before we run full-tilt into 2026, we wanted to take a moment to celebrate the titles that Xbox players made a part of their year, across all devices – from console, to PC, to handheld, to cloud. Today, we’re announcing the recipients of the 2025 Xbox Excellence Awards.

Introduced last year, the Xbox Excellence Awards celebrate games – and the teams behind them – based on how you engaged with Xbox over the last year. As such, we’ve picked out four key categories, which represent players’ enthusiasm, passion, engagement, and love. Those four categories are:

• Store Rating: The highest-rated content across our stores released in 2025, with a minimum of 500 ratings.
• Player Engagement: The games with the highest average hours per-player within the first six weeks of release.
• Daily Active Users: Games, expansions, or major updates with the highest single-day active users in 2025. You may notice games that weren’t released in 2025 in this list – that’s because they got a significant update last year.
• Units Sold: Top-selling content across Xbox and Microsoft stores.

The final list represents a diverse collection of titles produced by studios of wildly varying sizes. You’ll find 55 total games, with 16 currently available through Xbox Game Pass. It features 48 unique developers hailing from 13 countries, and brought to you by 24 publishers, alongside 19 self-published titles. 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. You can find the titles for each category – listed alphabetically – below.