Despite a lack of big day one releases last month (naturally, not many games launch in January), Xbox Game Pass saw some major additions in the first month of 2026 - and the folks over at Alinea Analytics have provided some interesting data on how these big games performed on the service.
Death Stranding Director's Cut, Star Wars Outlaws and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2 all brought in over half a million players following their additions to the Xbox Game Pass library last month. These figures are across console, PC and cloud platforms, and the data is based on "Game Pass users who used their sub to access the games for the very first time".
Alinea's Rhys Elliott summed up the team's findings on X:
Resident Evil Village's numbers are clearly much lower in terms of a new AAA addition to the service, but it appears that this is because a lot of folks already owned the older 2021 title. Elliott adds that Village still had more than 500K monthly active users on Xbox in January, meaning lots of folks were simply replaying a game they already owned ahead of Requiem's upcoming launch. Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound performed similarly on XGP, with that title having a smaller audience overall.
Anyway, we just thought this was interesting to look at, and it clearly shows that hundreds of thousands of players are actively engaging with big Xbox Game Pass additions here, even if they aren't day one releases for the service.