Xbox had five of 2023’s best-selling games in the US, mainly thanks to Activision Blizzard

With Activision Blizzard now firmly included as a first-party Xbox studio, Microsoft could be looking at a very profitable year ahead. Just looking at 2023, Microsoft and Activision Blizzard had five of the top 20 bestselling games in the US.

As revealed by industry analyst Mat Piscatella on X (executive director at Circana), Warner Bros. Games’ Hogwarts Legacy took the top spot as 2023’s best-selling game, but the top 20 list also includes Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II and Modern Warfare III, Diablo IV, Starfield, and Minecraft.

Piscatella says the data is based on dollar sales for both digital and physical editions of the games and excludes add-on content, so it’s just base game sales.

Here are the top 20 best-selling games of 2023 according to Circana’s data:

Warner Bros. had already said that Hogwarts Legacy was the top-selling game of 2023, and as such, the company revealed that a “series of other things” based on the wizarding world are now in the works. Unsurprisingly, no matter what you think about this year’s Call of Duty game, Modern Warfare III sits comfortably in the second spot. A little more surprising, however, is seeing 2022’s Modern Warfare II continue to sell well enough last year to make it into seventh. We’d have thought that the majority of its sales would have happened during its launch month, but it seems to have outdone itself in 2023.

Sitting just above Modern Warfare II in sixth is Diablo 4, which is Blizzard’s fastest-selling game ever. It had a rocky start with veteran players, but as we step into its third season — Season of the Construct — it seems players are falling in love with the RPG again.

The list then sees Mortal Kombat 1, Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and EA Sports FC 24 take the spots above Bethesda’s space-traveling RPG Starfield, which is tenth on the list. Much like Diablo 4 for Blizzard, Starfield became the “biggest Bethesda game launch of all time” when it launched in Xbox Game Pass in September.

Sitting at the bottom of the list in spot 20, under games like the fantastic Dead Island, Street Fighter 6, and Elden Ring, is Minecraft… yes, that game that has been around forever at this point. Minecraft continues to be a winning ticket for Microsoft, and seeing it make it into the top 20 best-selling games of 2023 proves just how popular the blocky game is. Nice work Mojang!

While we’ll need to wait until later this year to find out when Activision Blizzard’s games will join Xbox Game Pass, Starfield and Minecraft are both available in the service and sit comfortably in our best Game Pass games list.