Microsoft has lined up seven cities for an Xbox FanFest world tour starting August 26 in Cologne, with dates running through November and a final stop in Seattle still to be announced. The tour celebrates 25 years of Xbox — a milestone the brand will hit this November.

Announced in an Xbox Wire blog post on August 3, the tour spans Cologne (August 26, during gamescom), Tokyo (September 17, during Tokyo Game Show), London (September 26), Mexico City and Sydney (both October 17), Toronto (November 6), and Seattle (date TBA) (Xbox Wire). Tickets are not sold — they are distributed through city-specific sweepstakes, a lottery-style giveaway that is not yet open (Eurogamer).

The tour was first teased back in April, with five cities named at the time. The August 3 update added Tokyo and Toronto to the roster and locked in the dates.

FanFest events are part convention, part fan celebration: hands-on play sessions, developer appearances, and community activities. At the Los Angeles FanFest — which ran alongside the Xbox Games Showcase in June, before the current restructuring was announced — attendees were each given an Xbox Series X console finished in original Xbox green. Xbox leaders Asha Sharma and Matt Booty were on site.

The tour also arrives in the shadow of significant cuts. Microsoft laid off 1,600 people from its Xbox division and plans another 1,600 over the next year, according to Eurogamer (Eurogamer). Among those let go was Chris Munson, the creator of FanFest, who wrote on LinkedIn that he was affected by the layoffs after 15 and a half years at the company. The tour he built is going ahead without him.

For players planning to follow the tour, the Cologne stop offers the most to experience in one place: Xbox's gamescom 2026 booth will feature 25 upcoming games and 140 playable stations (Xbox Wire).

Console pricing adds another wrinkle for anyone considering a purchase alongside the anniversary celebrations. In Europe, the Xbox Series S now costs £430 and the Series X costs £670 — the entry-level Series S having crept up to nearly the exact launch price of the Series X (Eurogamer).

For fans, the tour is a chance to mark a quarter-century of a platform that started as a single green-and-black console and grew into a global ecosystem of hardware, subscriptions, and studios. Whether the sweepstakes open and how many tickets each city receives remain details Microsoft has not yet shared.