Welcome back to the Fancensus Spotlight, where we reveal how games compete for attention and identify their winning strategies to overcome competition. In the final stretch before Christmas, countdown sales, holiday events, and a certain returning cop from Raccoon City show how quickly the spotlight can shift when storefronts and social feeds light up together. Before we dive in let's recap what a "Flare Score" is for our new readers.
Flare Score is Fancensus’ proprietary metric that summarises how strongly a game is performing across key visibility channels, normalised to a scale of 0–100. More specifically, Flare looks at multiple quantitative and qualitative signals from areas such as press coverage, social media activity, and retailer/storefront discoverability into a single comparable score.
It is designed to let teams quickly see which titles are “burning brightest” in a given window, and to compare performance across different platforms, regions, or time periods without having to manually reconcile disparate metrics. Now that's out of the way, let's unpack the data.
Console Discoverability
On Xbox, the countdown to Christmas put blockbusters front and centre, with all top five titles folded into the “Countdown” sale. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 led with 100 Flare Score, remaining the most visible game on the store thanks to ongoing Season 1 ads (live since 4 December), a 30% discount barely a month after launch, and major placement across home, Game Pass, and deals pages. The Outer Worlds 2 followed at 95 Flare Score, boosted by a “The Game Awards” promotion on the Xbox home page, Game Pass Ultimate messaging across store sections, and its own 30% countdown discount. Minecraft held strong at 79 Flare Score on the back of fresh “Mounts of Mayhem” update promotion plus its evergreen presence. EA Sports FC 26 at 60 Flare Score combined Game Awards‑themed home‑page banners with a prominent 50% Christmas sale, while Arc Raiders (54 Flare Score) joined the party via the “Buy once, play anywhere” adverts and a 20% countdown discount just two months after release.
On PlayStation, Battlefield 6 dominated visibility with a perfect 100 Flare Score, driven by major sponsored banners on the “Latest” page. Particularly the featured and “What’s Hot” sections supported by additional non‑sponsored slots in “Must See.” World of Warships: Legends (24 Flare Score) rode its “Christmas on the Waves” push, with seasonal promotion on the collections page plus sponsored banners at the top of both Latest and Collections. Resident Evil 9: Requiem (22 Flare Score) and Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (22 Flare Score) each scored 22%: RE9 appeared on the welcome screen as part of a “2026 Great Games” collection alongside Saros, 007: First Light, and Nioh 3, with a dedicated Resident Evil collection boosting its profile, while Flight Simulator, launched on PS5 on 8th December, earned unsponsored Latest page banners, a notable example of Sony actively promoting a Microsoft published title. Ghost of Tsushima (20 Flare Score) closed out the top five at 20%, helped by a 50% sale that pushed it up the deals page and by PlayStation Plus subscription banners giving the classic another late year lift.
Spotlight title: Resident Evil 9: Requiem
Focusing on 2026 titles, Resident Evil 9: Requiem stood alone at the top of press and social activity last week with a Press & Social Flare score of 67, ranking first on Facebook and X, second on YouTube and in the press, and staying safely within the top 10 even on lower impact platforms. Activity peaked early in the week before tapering off, but not before RE9 amassed coverage in more than 300 press headlines across 351 sites. The immediate spark came from new images released by Capcom showing an updated look for fan‑favourite Leon S. Kennedy, including a mysterious mark on his neck that ignited speculation about his fate and whether he would survive this latest entry. Press and community debate quickly broadened into talk of other potential returning characters such as Sherry Birkin, Claire Redfield, and Ada Wong, even though none of these appearances have been confirmed.
Capcom timed the character beat carefully. Sales activity around Resident Evil 2 on Steam aligned neatly with the Leon reveal, supported by posts from the Resident Evil brand account on X that drew around 125k views and explicitly invited players to “experience Leon S. Kennedy’s Raccoon City origin story in Resident Evil 2,” all tied together with the #ReturnToRaccoonCity hashtag to funnel nostalgia into hype for RE9. On YouTube, creators shifted quickly into analysis mode; one of the top videos, “3 Cool Details in Resident Evil 9” from Giio‑Pran, surpassed 800k views by zooming in on clues from the existing gameplay and story trailers. Short‑form content helped extend the moment: clips from earlier games featuring Leon performed strongly on both YouTube and TikTok, including a fan edit from isa.dhax that racked up more than 1.1 million views and over 300k likes, reinforcing how legacy character beats can be recycled into fresh attention when handled with care.
This pre‑Christmas window underlines how discounts, seasonal promos, and character‑driven reveals can work together to create sharp but powerful spikes in attention. Titles like Black Ops 7, The Outer Worlds 2, and Battlefield 6 show the impact of well timed storefront campaigns, while Resident Evil 9: Requiem demonstrates how a single set of images and a smartly framed nostalgia hook can dominate the conversation even a year out from launch.
Fancensus Spotlight will be taking a short break next week, but will return in the new year to keep unpacking these patterns so developers and publishers can turn attention data into a real competitive edge for their 2026 plans.
