Announcing the Xbox Excellence Awards: Celebrating 2024’s Most Beloved Game Studios

At the heart of our mission is a commitment to sharing the joy of gaming with everyone, and to unite a global community of players. With more screens than ever capable of being an Xbox, they are brought to life by a vast selection of incredible games created by talented developers around the globe. These development teams work passionately to craft unforgettable gaming experiences that captivate and motivate players of all kinds. To show our appreciation for these ingenious creators and highlight the games that captured players’ hearts in 2024, we are thrilled to unveil the winners of the 2024 Xbox Excellence Awards.

Each year, Xbox sees the arrival of over a thousand games across consoles, PCs, and the cloud, and deciding the best is no small task. The Excellence Awards focus on how you connected with Xbox over the past year. We honed in on four essential categories that reflect the players’ enthusiasm, involvement, and admiration for these games. These categories include:

Store Rating: Featuring the highest-rated content of 2024, requiring at least 500 ratings.

Player Engagement: Highlighting games with the highest average playtime per user within the first six weeks of launch.

Daily Active Users: Recognizing games, expansions, or significant updates with the highest single-day active users in 2024. You may notice some games here that didn’t debut in 2024; that’s because they received substantial updates recently.

Units Sold: Celebrating the best-selling content on Xbox and Microsoft stores.

This final lineup showcases a rich variety of titles crafted by teams that vary from small to large, spanning 15 countries across the world. Here are the titles for each category, listed alphabetically:

Store Rating:

• Balatro
• Banishers: Ghosts of New Eden
• Botany Manor
• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
• Little Kitty, Big City
• Lollipop Chainsaw RePop
• Metaphor: ReFantazio
• Persona 3 Reload
• Phasmophobia
• Shin Megami Tensei V: Vengeance

Player Engagement:

• Dragon Age: The Veilguard
• Dragon’s Dogma 2
• EA Sports College Football 25
• EA Sports FC 25
• F1 Manager 2024
• House Flipper 2
• Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth
• Nobody Wants to Die
• Return to Grace
• Still Wakes the Deep

Daily Active Users:

• Apex Legends
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
• Dead Island 2
• Diablo IV: Vessel of Hatred
• Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree
• Fallout 4
• Forza Horizon 5
• Grand Theft Auto Online
• Minecraft
• NBA 2K25
• NHL 25
• Path of Exile 2
• Roblox
• Rocket League
• Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six Siege

Units Sold:

• 7 Days to Die
• Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 6
• EA Sports FC 25
• EA Sports Madden NFL 25
• Farming Simulator 25
• MLB The Show 24
• New World: Aeternum
• Palworld
• Skull and Bones
• Star Wars Outlaws
• The Lord of the Rings: Return to Moria
• Unicorn Overlord
• Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2
• WWE 2K24

The developers and publishers of these games will be receiving their awards soon, so keep an eye out to see how they celebrate their achievements!

Curious about joining the legions of players who made these games award winners? Head over to the Xbox Store to explore our collection of 2024 Xbox Excellence Award recipients.