‘Hogwarts Legacy’ Is Beating ‘Modern Warfare 3’ As The Best-Selling Game Of 2023

New rankings are out from Circana, formerly the NPD, showing the top-selling games of 2023, at least as of the end of November.

Here’s the chart in full, and there are a few different stories to extract from it:

First, as it stands, Hogwarts Legacy, an original game from a high profile IP, is outselling Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, a rarity, and close to impossible for a non-sequel like Pokemon, Red Dead Redemption or Grand Theft Auto. The last we heard from May 2023 was that Hogwarts Legacy had sold 15 million copies, and it seems likely that 20 million will be hit soon enough, given that it hasn’t been announced already.

Modern Warfare 3 sales, however, are reportedly down from last year’s MW2, which is not a huge shock, given that it’s close to an expansion for the last game. But its multiplayer has been well-received, and it’s important to keep in mind that is only a couple of weeks of sales, while Hogwarts Legacy was out in February. For a full year of sales, MW3 will likely take it, but we wouldn’t know that for a while. It’s also a “live” game while Hogwarts Legacy is a one-and-done single player with no DLC announced for it.

The rest of the list? Two console exclusives are next, showing off just how strong their sales are, Tears of the Kingdom for Nintendo and Marvel’s Spider-Man 2 for Sony, where that game was supposed to be its fastest selling exclusive ever, at least in a very short amount of time.

Diablo 4 and Modern Warfare 2 also make the list, meaning Activision has 3 out of the 10 top selling games of the year, which I’m sure Microsoft likes to see. And I do think it’s impressive that Microsoft’s Starfield is in the top 10, given that it launched on Xbox and PC Game Pass meaning those players do not have to buy it. But some of them have, and the game also sold extremely well on Steam. It being top 10 under those circumstances is noteworthy.

Any bad news here? Super Mario Bros. Wonder is pretty low for a high profile Nintendo game. Final Fantasy XVI also seems low for a big game and even with PlayStation exclusivity, it feels like it probably should have been higher.

Remnant 2 made the top 20! Really happy to see that, as it’s one of my favorites this year, and was really underrated and ignored by the media as a whole.

So yes, it seems like Hogwarts Legacy will take the rare crown from Call of Duty in 2023, though long-term that may not be the case, given that Modern Warfare 2 is #7 here and those games keep selling for a long time.

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