‘Hogwarts Legacy’ Is The Best-Selling Game On Steam A Full Month Early

While 2023 is going to be a massive year for gaming across all platforms, there’s some debate about what the biggest game is going to be. Xbox’s Starfield? Sony’s Spider-Man 2? Nintendo’s Tears of the Kingdom? Diablo 4?

Well, there may be a different contender, Hogwarts Legacy, if it can deliver on its promise of being a dream Harry Potter game.

As it stands right now, Hogwarts Legacy, despite not being released until February 10, is the #1 best-selling game on Steam. You can see it on the Top Sellers chart behind only the Steam Deck itself, and CS:GO, which is not a game being “sold” but rather a top seller because of its microtransactions. These are full-on prepurchases that have rocketed Hogwarts Legacy above games that are actually out that you can play like Modern Warfare 2 and High On Life, lower down on the chart.

There is a very public debate going on about Hogwarts Legacy and whether playing/buying/covering it amounts to proxy support for the creator of the Harry Potter universe, JK Rowling, who has repeatedly expressed anti-trans views on social media. While the issue is important, I have been around for enough “boycott this game” campaigns to know that they rarely play out if it’s a coveted title everyone wants to play, and we are already seeing that in action here with this level of presales. It may disappoint many, but the controversy over JK Rowling’s views is simply unlikely to make a noticeable dent in sales.

Whether Hogwarts Legacy is one of the biggest hits of the year or a flop will depend on the game itself, and whether it can live up to the pretty lofty expectations that have been set for it. It really does look like the sprawling Harry Potter game fans have always wanted, choosing your house, exploring Hogwarts and a massive landscape, dueling with spells, it’s seemingly astonishingly comprehensive, and as such, I can understand why marketing so far has driven presales this high.

Hogwarts Legacy also boasts something most of the other games mentioned here don’t have, multi-platform availability. At least three of the biggest games of the year will be locked to one console, or one console and PC in Starfield’s case. Diablo 4 will mostly be PC-centric, most likely. But Hogwarts Legacy will be out for last and current gen Xboxes, PlayStations, PC and even Nintendo Switch. That’s a bigger install base than any other game I’ve mentioned.

So, even if 2023 is a huge year for games overall, if Hogwarts Legacy can deliver, it’s going to be one of the biggest stories in the industry. If not, one of the biggest failures. One month until we find out which.

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