Poll: Which Is Your Favourite Xbox First-Party Release Of 2025?

When the voting began for the Pure Xbox Game of the Year 2025 a few days ago, we mentioned how Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 would likely run away with it — and spoiler alert, it's probably going to win.

Look beyond that game though, and a whole bunch of first-party titles are likely to finish in the top 10. While the likes of Avowed, The Outer Worlds 2 and DOOM: The Dark Ages don't seem to be proving too popular in the various awards being handed out this year, our poll suggests they've been a hit with Xbox fans over the past 12 months.

And by the way, we loved them too! Here are just a few Xbox first-party reviews from Pure Xbox this year:

Now, we know there's some debate about what constitutes a "first-party" game, but we're taking the Sony route and choosing to qualify it as anything that's published under the Xbox / Microsoft banner, including games from Bethesda and Activision Blizzard. That means the likes of Ninja Gaiden 4 make the cut.

We've also seen a suggestion that we should conduct a separate poll for just the Xbox exclusives that have released in 2025, but that's becoming a harder prospect than ever — Microsoft isn't big at all on exclusives anymore, and a lot of the (timed) third-party Xbox exclusives actually go under the radar and are hard to create a complete list for.

Nevertheless, we do have a list of "Best Xbox Exclusives" that we update periodically:

There's plenty to be getting on with in terms of Xbox-published games, anyway! So, in the poll and comments below, we want you to pick a favourite — and please do elaborate and share all your other favourites from 2025 as well.

Then, we'll be back on Christmas Day to reveal how the Pure Xbox Game of the Year results turned out (it'll be interesting to see if the first-party rankings are different to this specific poll), and we'll share exactly how many points each game received in a separate "The Results You Didn't See" article on December 26th.

Which Is Your Favourite Xbox First-Party Release Of 2025? (383 votes)

  1. Avowed (February 18)18%
  2. South of Midnight (April 8)17%
  3. The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion Remastered (April 23)8%
  4. Towerborne (April 29)  0.5%
  5. DOOM: The Dark Ages (May 15)19%
  6. Xbox Retro Classics (May 21)  0.3%
  7. Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 3+4 (July 11)3%
  8. Grounded 2 (July 29)2%
  9. Heretic + Hexen (August 7)2%
  10. Senua's Saga: Hellblade 2 Enhanced (August 12)2%
  11. Gears of War: Reloaded (August 26)2%
  12. Keeper (October 17)5%
  13. Ninja Gaiden 4 (October 21)7%
  14. The Outer Worlds 2 (October 29)13%
  15. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 (November 14)1%

What did you pick in the poll? Got any other favourites to tell us about? Let us know down below.