We already knew Tears of the Kingdom sales were off to a strong start, and it turns out they didn’t slow down after launch. Mat Piscatella, executive director at Circana (formerly the NPD group) posted his monthly breakdown of sales across the games industry on Twitter, and Tears of the Kingdom wasn’t just the best-selling game of May 2023. It’s already the second best-selling game of the year.
Hogwarts Legacy from Warner Bros. remains the year’s best-selling game, though Warner Bros. reported digital and physical sales for that one. Nintendo doesn’t report digital sales, so the Zelda game may have surpassed Hogwarts’ sales.
YTD 2023 Top 20 Best-Selling Premium Games (Dollar Sales, Excludes add-on content) pic.twitter.com/IMPq3kBike
— Mat Piscatella (@MatPiscatella) June 27, 2023
Tears of the Kingdom’s enthusiastic welcome isn’t too surprising. Launch sales reached over 10 million in less than a week, and entire communities sprang up around the game just weeks after release, including the Hyrule Engineering group, dedicated to building devices both outlandish – sometimes to torment Koroks – and practical, such as a scale to see how much Link weighs.
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, which launched near the end of 2022, is the third best-selling game of 2023, with Star Wars Jedi: Survivor and Resident Evil 4 remake close behind. Resident Evil 4 remake also shattered Capcom’s previous sales records for the series.
Elden Ring rounds off the top 10, with Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and The Last of Us Part 1 not far behind.
Meanwhile, Tears of the Kingdom’s launch also boosted its prequels popularity. Breath of the Wild rose from the 28th best-selling game of April 2023 to the 18th best-selling game of May.
Written by Josh Broadwell on behalf of GLHF
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