What were the top new PC & console games of 2023?
We crunch lots of numbers & come to some conclusions.
[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?
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 - initial releases only, not ‘1.0 graduates’, so no Baldur’s Gate 3 - by units sold, according to our estimates:
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.]
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:
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:
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:
‘E3 is dead - now what?’ is a good question for GI.Biz to ask, Curve’s Stuart Dinsey: “The channel - as we once called retail - disappeared, and digital took over. The ROI for exhibitors, always debatable, disappeared.” Do we need a replacement? GameSpot’s Tamoor Hussain: “I'd argue between Summer Game Fest and Gamescom, we're already in a good position.”
Just Steam things: the Steam Awards nominees (above) are out now - congrats if you got nominated; Steam Workshop got enhanced so “make it easier to create ‘presets’ or ‘mod lists’ that you can swap between”; Valve has its interactive year in review for players to see what they played (and for how long!)
In the shift back away from ‘GaaS at all costs’, Naughty Dog announced it’s stopping work on The Last Of Us Online: “We had two paths in front of us: become a solely live service games studio or continue to focus on single-player narrative games that have defined Naughty Dog’s heritage.” (The latter is happening…)
Microlinks: Baldur's Gate 3 'isn't going to be on Game Pass', insists Larian boss; PlayStation Plus’ Dec. 2023 Game Catalog adds GTA V, Stranger Of Paradise & Metal: Hellsinger; The Game Awards breaks viewership record with 118 million livestreams, up 15% YoY.
Apple released a list of the Top Apple Arcade games of 2023 (by unknown to us metrics?): “NBA 2K23 Arcade Edition; Cooking Mama: Cuisine!; Bloons TD 6+; Angry Birds Reloaded; Sneaky Sasquatch; Warped Kart Racers; Hello Kitty Island Adventure; Snake.io+; Fruit Ninja Classic+; Solitaire by MobilityWare+” And coming to Apple Arcade in January 2024: Tamagotchi Adventure Kingdom and Cornsweeper.
ViewStats is a neat new YouTube stats site co-founded by MrBeast - here’s SplatterCat’s channel analyzed on it for views, subs, and estimated revenue. You can also look at channels like PlayStation, which has a big spike for all those Game Awards trailers, for example.
Non PC/console microlinks: the ‘Netflix login’-exclusive Grand Theft Auto mobile titles made it to #1 on the iOS/Google Play stores immediately after launch; Roblox launches video ads, with plans to scale advertising in 2024; some musings on why Quest 2 seems to have outsold Quest 3 by 3:1 (on Amazon, at least) during the holiday season.
Since the Playstation 5 was way more hardware-constrained in Europe than the U.S. last holiday season, we’re still seeing big (59%!) year-on-year hardware growth for November 2023 - with PS5 sales up 376%. This compares to Switch hardware sales being down 35%, and Xbox Series S and X down 26% (in Europe) compared to November 2022.
A GameDiscoverCo Plus Discord user pointed out to us that Nintendo’s latest Festive Offers sale email in Europe for the Switch eShop offered properly personalized recommendations (based on previous purchases!), both in the email & web store. (But not in the Switch eShop interface itself - get on that, Nintendo.)
One follow-up from that localization piece: we had a LinkedIn discussion on the virtues of Traditional Chinese (vs. just Simplified). Taiwanese, Hong Kong-ese, and a small subset of mainland Chinese players only play in Traditional. (And many games have unofficial ‘Trad China language’ mods.) So there you go…
Esoteric links: Netflix’s most-streamed video game-related TVs and movies, analyzed; ‘the rise and fall of podcasting’ has interesting parallels for games; the state of the tabletop RPG market; is GenAI a sustaining or disruptive innovation in Hollywood?
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.]
Am I reading this right in that Balders Gate 3 didn’t reach the top 20 on any platform???