What were the top new PC & console games of 2023?

Publikováno: 18.12.2023

We crunch lots of numbers & come to some conclusions.

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[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]

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What’s the top new PC & console games of 2023?

Congrats to, uhh, the 1964 U.S. Men’s Basketball team?

For our final GameDiscoverCo newsletter of 2023, we thought we’d try to rank the year’s top new releases across PC (well, Steam!) and console. This isn’t easy, but we’ve done our best. And the results are part predictable, part intriguing.

Let’s start out on Steam, with GameDiscoverCo’s look at the top new games of 2023 by units sold, according to our estimates:

(Thx to Gamalytic for massive algorithm help! We’re only counting ‘new games’, not Early Access => 1.0 graduates, btw.)

Some interesting results, with Endnight’s creepy co-op survival/horror standout Sons Of The Forest (#1!) a worthy (& independent) victor. And there’s multiple tiny-dev co-op or multiplayer games (Lethal Company, BattleBit Remastered, Demonologist) in the Top 20. Oh, and a FMV Chinese dating game in the Top 20? Only on Steam!

Also notable: trendy ‘masocore’ 3D platformer Only Up! made it to #17 - kicking off a host of imitators in Fortnite - before being delisted in September. And then for Steam, we also took a look at the top new 2023 games by gross revenue:

As you might expect, this puts the $40-60 games - many of them sequels or IP re-arrangements - quite a bit further up the chart. with Hogwarts Legacy advancing to #2 and titles like Atomic Heart (original IP!) & ARK: Survival Ascended entering the Top 20. (Love Is All Around disappeared entirely, due to its $ and China-centricity.)

Also notable: F2P games are considered in this chart, but.. there aren’t any. (Does this tell you something about launching new F2P titles on Steam in 2023? Though we reckon The Finals would have made it in, if it had released earlier in the year.)

[BTW, a sidebar on Call Of Duty: MW III. Since it’s been added as ‘DLC’ to the core Modern Warfare game app on both PC and console, it’s kinda untrackable via normal methods. We’ve estimated it as a % of the 2022 release - the best we can do - but may have overestimated.]

(This includes Xbox, PC, and cloud Game Pass players of these titles.)

Next up, above is our estimates of the most-downloaded ‘Day 1 Game Pass’ Xbox ecosystem games of 2023. Atomic Heart was huge - and a great pickup for Xbox, as was the GoldenEye 007 remaster. And horror games (Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Amnesia: The Bunker) also did good.

[BTW, you’ll see a handful of ‘older’ games in here, like Monster Hunter Rise and even the ancient Quake II, haha. But this chart is ‘games released for the first time on Microsoft’s store platforms in 2023 and also Game Pass on the same day’, for context.]

We’ve also estimated the top Xbox games for the year which didn’t appear on Game Pass, by units (as opposed to $) And you’ll see a lot of the usual suspects:

(This chart includes both digital and physical purchases, btw.)

And, yep - there’s Call Of Duty, Hogwarts, EA Sports FC, and even Diablo IV’s console version hitting the Top 5. We can even see Alan Wake 2 (#15) & Baldur’s Gate 3 (#19, going up!) sneaking into the Top 20 too.

It’s interesting that no cheaper (<$50) non-AAA games ship lots of paid units on Xbox, unlike Steam. That’s also true of the top new PlayStation games of 2023:

(This also includes both physical and digital units, and ignores PS+ downloads.)

Notable in here? A strong first-party showing from Spider-Man 2 - a relatively recent release - at #4 overall. And Square Enix’s Final Fantasy XVI doing well - but not spectacularly - at #10 from 2023’s new PlayStation releases.

Of course, some of the top titles - including Hogwarts Legacy & EA Sports FC 24 - benefit from still having PlayStation 4 versions, which will be included in the rankings. But we’d expect the PS4 SKUs to gradually disappear over time…

Finally, we managed to put together a Nintendo Switch U.S. eShop chart for the top new games of 2023, as follows:

The caveats? This is ranked by unit, we don’t estimate physical sales (which are very first-party skewed), this is just U.S. eShop (about 50% of the Western eShop units?), and it’s likely Super Mario Bros. Wonder will climb even higher digitally by year-end!

Still, this is a great sketch of the break-out games of 2023 on Switch, dominated by Nintendo-created titles (of course.) For third-parties, Rockstar’s Red Dead Redemption remaster did great, as did - since this is tracked by units - inexpensive titles like puzzler Suika Game & the original Survivors-like, uhh, Vampire Survivors.

The best-selling ‘more expensive’ third parties (besides Red Dead & a U.S.-centric baseball game that probably sold marginally in Europe) seem to be wholesome farming-adjacent titles (Fae Farm, Story Of Seasons: A Wonderful Life) or JRPG-ish things (Sea Of Stars). Nintendo’s audience loves Nintendo-y things, folks!

The game discovery news round-up…

OK, so we’re off in a sec, and back on the first week of January 2024. But before we go, here’s some platform and discovery news that we can all take a look at:

Finally, we were going to link Valve’s amazing move of handing out a ‘Highly Toxic Lump Of Coal’ and a ban (for gaming the system) in their DOTA 2 Xmas virtual gifts. (That was an all-timer of an Xmas ‘joke’, folks…)

But then we saw this fascinating video compositing all 369 people to speedrun Super Mario Bros. in less than 5 minutes.. into one video. What a display! Happy holidays:

[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]

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