For the first time in five years, Call of Duty has failed to be the best-selling game in the United States. The Activision-published series has become a yearly blockbuster event in the gaming industry, but even impressive – if expected – sales of Modern Warfare 3 weren’t enough to top the 2023 sales chart. It was Avalanche Software’s Hogwarts Legacy which managed to unseat the reigning franchise, usurped by another incredibly popular media property.
Sales figures come courtesy of GamesIndustry.biz, which cites Circana for its US sales data. This marks the first time a Call of Duty game wasn’t the year’s bestseller since Red Dead Redemption 2 took the prize in 2018. Even then, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 once again took second place.
According to the GamesIndustry.biz infographic, Hogwarts Legacy topped a US bestsellers category in which 10 games were listed:
Hogwarts Legacy managed to earn the most sales in the United Kingdom as well, but the market in Japan was dominated by Nintendo Switch titles lead by Tears of the Kingdom. Interestingly, TOTK has an asterisk in the infographic denoting that its digital sales were not included. Nintendo tends not to disclose digital sales numbers, and accounting for physical-only not only makes its bronze medal in the US more impressive, but suggests it potentially could have earned one of the top two spots if digital sales had been tallied.
Second place can’t be considered any sort of failure, especially considering residual sales of 2022’s Modern Warfare 2 propelled it to 2023’s seventh place (although this isn’t quite as impressive as in 2020 or 2021, when CoD games were both the bestseller and the runner-up). It speaks more to the continued popularity of the Harry Potter brand, otherwise referred to as the Wizarding World franchise. In fact, Hogwarts Legacy’s accomplishment is quite an outlier considering the other titles that managed to beat Call of Duty in sales since the series began yearly releases.
2023-12-21 06:41:03
Article from screenrant.com