Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, is surprisingly not at the top of the sales charts for games sales in 2023. This isn’t the first time Call of Duty has been bumped from the number-one spot in game sales for the year. But it’s rare that Activision’s first-person shooter isn’t the best-selling game. Over the franchise’s history, there have been just a few occasions where it wasn’t in this position. In 2013 and in 2018.
Those two years were during the releases of Call of Duty: Ghosts, and Call of Duty: Black Ops IV. Both of which were universally panned by players. In the same year, they also faced stiff competition. Grand Theft Auto V was released in 2013 and in 2018 Rockstar launched Red Dead Redemption 2. Each of those games was widely accepted as an exceptional release. And that paired with the lukewarm reception for the Call of Duty titles released in those years probably made it a bit easier to dethrone Activision’s behemoth franchise.
In fact, outside of those two years, Call of Duty has been the best-selling game every year since 2009’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2. That year NPD Group (now Circana) reported MW2 had sales of 11.86 million copies worldwide.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III sales topped by Hogwarts Legacy
As reported by Engadget and initially reported by Circana’s Mat Piscatella, Hogwarts Legacy was the number-one-selling game for 2023. These are based on worldwide charts and on dollar sales for both physical and digital sales. However, not every game has digital sales counted because digital sales of those titles have yet to be reported. For example, Nintendo hasn’t reported digital sales of The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom for the last four months of 2023.
Those four months include holiday sales numbers. Which could help push TotK to the number one spot when all is said and done. It currently sits at number five with 19.5 million copies sold. And that’s only a stone’s throw away from the 22 million of Hogwarts Legacy.
