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It's already December, somehow. 2025 has been one of my favorite years, ever. Games have never been better. I got to travel the world to see friends and awesome events. I reviewed well over sixty titles. So here's my top 15. 11-15 In no particular order, these games deserved shoutouts for how damned good they all are. South of Midnight Monster Train 2 NINJA GAIDEN 4 Dying Light: The Beast Eternal Strands Number Ten Avowed | Review Obsidian dominated 2025 with three high-quality releases. The first, Avowed, took the Pillars of Eternity universe into a first or third-person RPG featuring fantastic writing and excellent combat.

What a year in video games 2025 has been. For all the horrible layoffs and studio closures that have affected this industry, if you're someone that just enjoys playing video games, I'd argue that 2025 has been a year that stands as one of the very best in a long, long time. While our team is busy voting and deciding on our overall picks for XboxEra's 'Game of the Year', we all have our own personal favourites - me included. My picks this year are pretty varied, but still lean towards smaller, tighter experiences, as that's what I personally enjoy.

Alt: a black and white photo of a building with smoke coming out of it

Steam has released its list of the 100 top-selling games from January 1st to December 1st in 2025, and Xbox has a title on every tier. Top-selling Steam games for 2025, which include a handful of Xbox/Microsoft Gaming titles (Steam top sellers) In an extensive list, full of familiar titles, Steam has given us a comprehensive breakdown of its 100 top-selling games of 2025. They've tiered each ranking with Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Platinum as the naming convention. BRONZE (51st to 100, not in order) We have Street Fighter 6…

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Well, this came out of nowhere. DRM-free videogame marketplace GOG has been acquired from CD PROJEKT - by it's original co-founder, Michał Kiciński. In a surprise blog post featured on the GOG website, the GOG Team advised what's happening, and that Michał Kiciński - himself one of the original co-founders of CD PROJEKT is acquiring GOG from the company. "We believe the games that shaped us deserve to stay alive: easy to find, buy, download, and play forever. But time is annoyingly good at erasing them. Rights get tangled, compatibility breaks, builds disappear, and a nostalgic evening often turns into a troubleshooting session.

YouTube video by XboxEra

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Don't ask how, but I think I played more new games in 2025 than I ever have in a single year before. Which initially made trying to think of my Top 10 kinda difficult. So I tried to narrow things down by trying to focus on genuinely new games. So yeah, I loved Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O World Stage, but is it really a new game in 2025? Ditto the Capcom Fighting Collection 2. I loved it, but it feels wrong to include what is for all intents and purposes a collection of games most people have loaded on their Rasbperry Pis on a GOTY list in a year so full of incredible new games.

It's that most wonderful time of the year! It's the XboxEra Podcast Episode 294 - "The 6th Annual Grubbsmas Shpeshaltacular" - featuring Giant Bomb's Jeff Grubb! As per tradition, Nick is joined by the lovely Jeff Grubb for the last episode of the year. Nick tells the story of Grubbsmas, and how it came to be, and then it's all about the video games. From Metroid Prime 4, Fallout, new Halo books and the Analog 3D and of course the sad loss of the legendary Vince Zampella. We also take your community questions, and there might even be a rumourmill - we haven't seen one of those in a while!

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I am not a "game of the year" person. The whole idea seems utterly goofy to me---when I play so many games in a single year, many I've enjoyed and plenty I've scorned, how do I quantify that into some sort of top ten list? Well, that's the thing: I'm not going to bother! Just like the last time I made a list, below you'll find an excerpt of notable titles that have occupied mindshare in the year two-thousand and twenty five. It was a good year for games and an awful one for the industry, which has continued to see layoffs, studios closures, and assimilations into larger entities like the Electronic Arts and Saudi Arabia purchase.

I remember all of the times Xbox 'died'. It died in February 2008 when Microsoft officially acknowledged the 'Red Ring of Death' issues plaguing Xbox 360 hardware. It died again in 2013 with the Xbox One and its disastrous reveal. And then, it has gone and snuffed it pretty regularly since that timeframe, with every misstep and mistake framed as the literal death of the platform. In 2025, saying "Xbox is dead" with any sort of earnest seriousness sounds like a statement designed to farm precious engagement rather than any sort of meaningful discussion, or perhaps even worse, is uttered from a position of pure ignorance.

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Author Kelly Gay brings us back to Zeta Halo. We pick up at the end of Halo Infinite, spending a few weeks bridging the gap to the next game. It’s a three-sided look at coming to grips with loss and dealing with trauma. While not as miraculous a feat as her Didact-focused book Epitaph, Edge of Dawn manages to mostly be about nothing, and yet tells us everything. Halo: Edge of Dawn Review | Image Credit: Halo Studios I Hate You, Jega ‘Rdomnai John 117, Fernando Esparza (The Pilot), and The Weapon are the main characters in Halo: Edge of Dawn.

Today, developer VANGUARD and publisher KEMCO announced that their summoning-based turn-based role-playing game 'Hero Seekers' will launch on PC via Steam/Xbox PC, Xbox (Play Anywhere supported), PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch (US/UK) consoles on 9 January 2026. Pre-orders are now available on Xbox and Switch platforms. Previously made available on iOS and Android via Google Play, players will restore lost history in this by guiding Lunette---the only one who remembers the true past---as she summons forgotten heroes to fight beside her. Explore dungeons, build parties, and master strategic turn-based battles to reclaim the world’s destiny.

Over the weekend, developer Notorious Studios announced that its coming fantasy extraction role-playing game 'Eldegarde' will launch on PC via Steam into 1.0 on 21 January 2026. Devved by ex-Blizzard talent and originally titled Legacy: Steel & Sorcery, this PvEvE game launched into Steam Early Access in February 2025 and has garnered plenty of positive feedback and built a dedicated community over the last year. Have a gander below for more details on Eldegarde. Picking from iconic fantasy classes including Warrior, Rogue or Wizard, Eldegarde players can dive into a world of magic and steel, battling monsters and knights, as well as other players, through verdant fields, deep woods, and sinister crypts in order to find incredible loot and extract safely.

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Author Kelly Gay brings us back to Zeta Halo. We pick up at the end of Halo Infinite, spending a few weeks bridging the gap to the next game. It’s a three-sided look at coming to grips with loss and dealing with trauma. While not as miraculous a feat as her Didact-focused book Epitaph, Edge of Dawn manages to mostly be about nothing, and yet tells us everything. Halo: Edge of Dawn Review | Image Credit: Halo Studios I Hate You, Jega ‘Rdomnai John 117, Fernando Esparza (The Pilot), and The Weapon are the main characters in Halo: Edge of Dawn.