The Christmas and New Year period offers a great chance for many people to spend more time gaming and either check out the Game Pass catalogue, dip into their backlogs or simply buy new games to enjoy over the holidays.
So, which Xbox games fared the best over holiday 2025? Alinea Analytics has been looking into this, coming up with a list of top five Xbox games based on new players only for December 21st to January 5th. The results are based on estimates and include Xbox Game Pass titles, and here's how they look:
- ARC Raiders (564k new players on Xbox)
- NBA 2K26 (378k new players on Xbox)
- Mortal Kombat 1 (377k new players on Xbox)
- A Game About Digging A Hole (289k new players on Xbox)
- EA Sports FC 26 (286k new players on Xbox
In this top 5 list, there are a couple of Xbox Game Pass titles in Mortal Kombat 1 and A Game About Digging A Hole, both of which were added to the service in December. The other three simply sold a lot of copies, and it's worth noting those three appeared in the PlayStation list as well, although they all sold more on that platform (590k for ARC Raiders, 779k for NBA 2K26 and 1.7 million for EA Sports FC 26).
Another thing that Alinea highlights here is that shooters tend to sell really well on Xbox. For example, it's estimated that Xbox has accounted for 20% of all ARC Raiders and Battlefield 6 sales compared to 23% and 26% on PS5 respectively, whereas single-player focused games like Elden Ring and Hogwarts Legacy have sold much more on PlayStation.
The firm points to reasons like Xbox's online-shooter history, its "heavily concentrated" US and UK playerbase and Sony's "cinematic strategy" as potentially explaining why this genre has been so popular on Xbox over the years.
So, are you surprised to see these games in the list? What do you think about the shooter sales on Xbox? Tell us below.