My top announced games this year:

Hi-Fi Rush (Thanks for the reminder Ryuu)
Clockwork Revolution
Blade
South of Midnight
Towerborne

Xbox is cooking!!

1. Blade

2. Clockwork Revolution

3. South of Midnight

4. OD 

5. Towerborne

It's strange, quite alot of people are saying the change is live now in the US, including in this article, but I've yet to get the 15 minute lockout pop-up. Maybe it only happens if you try to spam the searches too fast as a bot protection measure? I've been doing the thing where you wait to see the Rewards program ribbon in the upper right corner of Bing fully turn blue, which takes about 5-7 seconds, the moment that fully turns blue is the moment that the points for the search register and you can click on the next icon in the trending searches.

Hopefully this 15 minute lockout stays gone for me, 15 minutes per 3 searches would be just the f-ing worst, as it would mean needing to remember to come back to Bing 10 times over the course of the day in order to get all 150 PC search points, plus remembering to use bing search on mobile 7 of those times. And if the 15 minute lockout counts for both PC and mobile in the same 15 minute window, you're looking at 17 total times you need to use bing PC and Bing mobile throughout the day. 

This is cool to see, I'm really glad to see Hogwarts do well and I really hope that WB doesn't f up the sequel with GaaS elements like they recently suggested they would; you hardly need GaaS to make money when you are moving this many copies of a fully singleplayer game.

I'm not sure it would have happened if CoD had been stronger this year though, I think I read that CoD MW3 sales were down by like 30% compared to MW2 last year, likely due to the poor reviews, so if CoD had been a proper non-rushed release this year, just those 2 months of November and December sales might have been enough for CoD to top Hogwart's February-December sales. 

MS buys COD = instantly becomes a trash meta, low selling franchise LOL .. I hope they didn’t spend too much on it .. 👀

Can confirm that my bing searches are currently on a 15-minute cooldown.

hmmm weird, I managed to do both of my mobile and web in like 15 minutes lol I just wait like 5sec between each one