How many Game of the Year awards has Xbox won?

The short answer

The question has three honest readings, and they differ by more than a factor of ten.

• Games you can play on an Xbox hold 5,843 awards — 65.1% of every award whose game has known platforms.
• Games Microsoft published itself hold 326, from 36 games. That is 3.6% of the database.
• Seasons won outright by one of those games: 0 of the 23 seasons tracked at full breadth.

The first number is the one that gets quoted, and it answers a different question. Almost every award-winning game ships on several platforms, so "playable on Xbox" mostly measures how many multiplatform games won — the same games also count for PlayStation and PC. The second and third numbers are the ones that belong to Xbox.

Xbox, PlayStation and Nintendo side by side

Sony's own games hold 2,060 awards and have won 7 census seasons, led by The Last of Us Part II on 325. Nintendo's hold 822 and have won 1, with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild on 265.

Nintendo also holds 5 wins from the 1990s and early 2000s. Those seasons rest on a handful of surviving awards each, which is why they are kept apart — the same trap the publisher ranking is built around.

Xbox's most-awarded own game is Forza Horizon 5, with 54. PlayStation's is The Last of Us Part II, with 325.

The closest an Xbox game has come

Across every census season, the best finish for a game Microsoft published is No. 2: Gears of War in 2006.

That season has a twist. Gears of War finished 8 awards behind The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, a Bethesda game. Microsoft bought Bethesda in 2021 — so the game that kept Xbox from its closest season title is now, on paper, an Xbox game.

The big ceremonies have been kinder than the field as a whole. Microsoft's own games have taken 8 Game of the Year awards from the ten ceremonies this site tracks separately — Halo and Gears of War at the D.I.C.E. Awards, Gears again at the Game Developers Choice Awards:

At The Game Awards the count is 0 — that is how many of its Game of the Year picks went to an Xbox-published game, against 3 for Sony and 1 for Nintendo.

The winners Microsoft bought

Microsoft does own the publisher of 3 census-season winners today. Every one of them was won before the purchase, by a company that was independent at the time and shipped on PlayStation too.

These are games whose publisher — Bethesda, Activision or Blizzard — Microsoft acquired later: 865 awards in all. Some only carry Activision's name because it published them outside Japan, as with Sekiro.

Counting them as Xbox wins would be like crediting a buyer with the trophies in the cabinet it moved into. An acquisition buys a publisher's future games, not its past awards, so on this site a game counts for Xbox only if it came out after Microsoft owned the label. The closing dates are on record: Mojang in November 2014, Bethesda in March 2021, Activision Blizzard in October 2023.

How this was counted

• Own game means the first publisher credited on Wikidata is one of the platform holder's labels. Later credits are regional publishers and ports — Bayonetta lists Nintendo only because Nintendo published its later re-release.
• Playable on includes ports that arrived years later. God of War won its awards as a PlayStation exclusive and still counts for PC, which is why this site never uses that number to talk about exclusives. The platform page explains the overlap.
• Pre-census seasons are not wins here. Halo: Combat Evolved shares the top of 2001 with Grand Theft Auto III, in a season with 7 awards on record. That is a tie, and a tie is not a title.

The full rules are in the methodology; how hardware sales line up against awards is on the console page.