Baldur's Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy, and Starfield Lead the Top Grossing Steam Games in 2023 - Sales
by William D'Angelo , posted on 12 January 2024 / 73,178 Views
Baldur's Gate 3 was the highest grossing new release in 2023 on Steam, according to estimates from Video Game Insights. The game generated $657 million in revenue in 2023.
Hogwarts Legacy came in second with $341 million in revenue, followed by Starfield with $235 million in revenue despite it also being available day one on Xbox Game Pass.
The remake of Resident Evil 4 came in fourth with $159 million in revenue, followed by Sons of the Forest with $116 million and Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon with $87 million.
The report also shares the top 10 best-selling new releases in 2023 on Steam by units. The top two games remain the same with Baldur's Gate 3 in first place and Hogwarts Legacy in second place.
Lethal Company came in third place by units sold, followed by Overwatch 2 in fourth place. Sons of the Forest came in fifth place, Starfield in sixth place, and BattleBit Remastered in seventh place.
The remake of Resident Evil 4 came in eighth place, The Finals in ninth place, and Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon rounds out the top 10.
Seven out 10 games appeared on both lists, the top games by units only include two free-to-play games, and five focus on multiplayer / co-op. Games without microtransactions dominate the top releases by full game revenue. Four of the games that appeared on the lists are developed by small indie teams of 16 or less.
There was a total of $9 billion in revenue generated in 2023 on Steam by new releases, which is double that of 2019. There was also a total of 580 million games sold.
Here are the top 10 highest grossing new releases in 2023 on Steam:
- Baldur's Gate 3 - $657 million
- Hogwarts Legacy - $341 million
- Starfield - $235 million
- Resident Evil 4 - $159 million
- Sons of the Forest - $116 million
- Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon - $87 million
- EA Sports FC 24 - $81 million
- Star Wars Jedi: Survivor - $68 million
- Lethal Company - $52 million
- Cities: Skylines II - $50 million
Here are the top 10 best-selling new releases in 2023 on Steam
- Baldur's Gate 3
- Hogwarts Legacy
- Lethal Company
- Overwatch 2
- Sons Of The Forest
- Starfield
- BattleBit Remastered
- Resident Evil 4
- The Finals
- Armored Core VI: Fires of Rubicon
A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012 and taking over the hardware estimates in 2017. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel. You can contact the author on Twitter @TrunksWD.
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So happy for Larian!
2 weeks into 2024 and Baldur's Gate 3 still refuses to leave out of the top 5 best selling games on Steam. Larian ROLLING in it!
As we speak, there's still like 211,000 people playing it. Its actually impressive that from October and onwards, into 2024, its been consistantly sitting around 280-300k peak players (pr month).
Its slowly on a decline, but its takeing its sweet time about it. Ei. This is either getting tons and tons of replay, or new people are replaceing old players that leave.
Whos literally suprised? Steam users eating good
To no ones surprise, Starfield did extremely well. Only edged out by the GOTY and a game in one of the world's biggest franchises that released in February.
I dunno about "edged out". BG did about 2X Starfield revenue on Steam, which is the point of this article. That's a solid whooping.
But, yeah, Starfield has done very well, as expected. Its revenue on Steam is certainly being depressed by Game Pass, but it still managed to come in 3rd.
BG3 numbers are amazing, Larian sure smashed their projections.
Hogwarts Legacy numbers are also Amazing. Remember, this game sold way more on consoles, the big numbers come from PS5/Xbox.
Hogwarts came out half a year before starfield (and Baldur's gate)
BG3 numbers were ridiculously lower in the early access.
Yeah, Hogwarts must have done more sales on console than PC, considering we know it was the bestselling game of 2023 with 22m copies sold, based on that revenue figure I'd say it sold roughly 6-7m copies on Steam out of the 22m.
Baldur's Gate 3 by comparison, probably has more revenue on PC than PS5 and Xbox Series combined, even now, a month after the Xbox launch. I wouldn't be surprised if Xbox + PS5 combined isn't even 2/3rds of the PC revenue on BG3.
These numbers are total nonsense btw. It’s just using the standard VG Insights sales estimates(which are terrible) and multiplying by price.
So BG3 sales estimate is 13.46m on Steam according to VG Insights. Except it had sold roughly 8-9M across all formats in December when Larian revealed how many people had completed the game(percentage of completion is publicly available from achievements). Playtracker has BG3 at 6.07m, which seems quite accurate.
Starfield is at 4.49m sales according to VG Insights, again this seems highly dubious right off the bat. Playtracker has it 1.54m sales, which makes more sense. They had about 1M sales during the “early access” and then sales dropped off dramatically, which seems to mirror the general perception of the game’s success.
Imprecise guesstmates get some people really happy you know.
A C-RPG topping the charts :) and somehow 2 horror type games in 4th and 5th.
If you think about it though, the top3 also all have rpg elements.
Yeah, if you told me 2022 how much success BG3 would have I would've called you crazy. No way a turn-based tactic party-based complex RPG (this is how I translate CRPG) could've have more than a niche audience. Larian did not itself believe in it, Sven Vincke joked he cannot face the IT-department now, because he told them to expect 100K concurrent players at max in the first weekend. There was no way you could expect this amount of success. Tim Cain names BG3 as one of his five modern RPG masterclasses, because he states, that he loves when industry know-it-alls are proved wrong when declaring a genre (CRPG) or a gameplay style (turn-based) is dead. It's nice that BG3 proves that a good game can make every genre popular.
Except that BG3 wouldn't sell nearly as much if it wasn't relying on beloved classic IP from the past, if it wasn't based on the D&D 5e, which is most sold and popular TTRPG of all times (only thing even remotely comparable is AD&D 2e, which Baldur's Gate 1/2 were based on) and if it didn't have Hasbro/WotC to back it up, especially when it comes to building a hype.
It's a good game (7.5/10), especially if viewed as megadungeon crawler (which it basically comes down to), but as an CRPG it is quite lacking and not nearly as innovative as "gaming press" is making it out to be.
Sorry, nobody except me and people like me still remembered Baldur's Gate, and we all already bought Pillars of Eternity, Obsidian is founded by people that were previously at Black Isle, involved with Baldur's Gate back at the time. And Pillars never set the world on fire the same way. Nobody of the players that made Baldur's Gate 3 more successful than Pillars actually knew the old baldur's Gate games.
And D&D - are you kidding me? Can you name any other successful D&D game? And let me tell you, it is not for lack of trying. Did you play Dungeons&Dragons: Dark Alliance from 2021, because D&D is such a successful franchise? Is Solasta: Crown of the Magister, which is D&D5e as well anywhere as successful as BG3?
No, BG3 isn't successful because of D&D, not because of the old games and if anything at all the scandal plagued Hasbro/WotC is a millstone than a boost. Nobody seriously could expect this level of success with all that knowledge beforehand. I expected it to be selling maybe double of Pillars or Divinity, if we are generous.
Sorry, but I really doubt that 2.5 millions sold during Early Access has not come from people who don't remember Baldur's Gate. They are far from best CRPGs, but everyone that has ever been even near CRPGs know what those games are and how successful they were.
You're some years younger than me, but you should remember SSI's D&D games - they were very successful for their time and platforms they were on.
As for Solasta, it is made by really small indie studio, using only 5e open license (thus limited to SRD), without backing of WotC, and while its official campaign shows lack of funding and is not that good (luckily there are plenty of user campaigns that are really good), it still trumps BG3 when it comes to tactical combat.
I don't know how much you've been involved in all things D&D 5e, I played and DMed it for some 7 years and all I can tell you if you don't think 5e's popularity has anything to do with success of BG3, than you really don't know how massive 5e player base is (estimated 50+ millions). This is not because 5e is that good (and it is really not), but mostly due to social media boom and mainstream exposure - and all of a sudden, playing D&D is not for geeks/nerds only anymore.
BG3 is exactly that product - it is really not that good (though better in some things than others), but being followup to most successful CRPG IP, based on most successful TTRPG and having Hasbro (desperate as they were, since their stock was in free fall) pushing hype (and that comes cheap these days with gaming "journalists"), you have success of this level.
BG3 is not a bad game, but if it was just D:OS 3, instead of BG3, it wouldn't sell nearly as much as it did.
Not sure about the last sentence, as from what I see online a lot of groups try now to catch players of BG3 to D&D groups, as these were new to D&D. I agree though, that most in Early Access comes from players who remember Baldur's Gate. It surely fits me. But that also fits my point: even with the success in early access, it only reached what other isometric CRPGs more or less reached (Pillars, Divinity, Pathfinder). But what is also true, that most of the players that played it only after release also said they never heard about BG - that includes the years of early access. So the early access was indeed successful for a CRPG - but the success after release is reaching new groups, far beyond D&D and old BG reach. That is my whole argument here.
And yeah, I know about Gold Box even though I am indeed a few years too young to really catch them they were still talked about a lot. And true, they were successful - at the time. Gaming was much smaller then. And talking about two to three decades old games to gauge popularity of D&D in video games today is kinda missing the mark.
We can discuss a lot about quality here and a lot depends on your view of what you want from an CRPG, but that is besides the point. The point is, that despite D&D, despite old Baldur's Gate, despite all this, nobody could've seriously expected the success BG3 actually did reach. It reached far beyond the D&D community, far beyond the existing CRPG fans, including old BG fans. So pinning the success on D&D and old BG games is kinda wrong.
It's strongest quality, systemic gameplay, reminds a lot of Ultima VII - and similar to Ultima VII, it is not that really good of an RPG, but very fun for what it does fairly good (try "anything", see what happens). This would be the same if it wasn't called BG3, but D:OS3 instead. But it is called BG3, and it had resources to be AAA game due to being D&D and it had hype it had due to being D&D - so not recognizing how important D&D and BG IP is in its success in reaching mass market is really wrong.
D&D is McDonalds of TTRPGs, BG3 is its VG counterpart.
As BG3 was self-financed by Larian, the budget would've been similar if it was DOS3 instead. The difference can only come from early access. So question is, if it would've gotten less sales in early access if it was DOS3 instead of BG3. And I would say yes, a little less, but not on a massive scale. That needs to be defined more. I say if it was developed as DOS3 it probably would've gotten about 15-30% less sales in early access. And yes, that translates in some reduced budget, which would influence the scale. But not qualitatively different.
I think you're massively underestimating how big D&D 5e is. Don't get me wrong, it's a fluke, and mostly undeserved, given that it's not that good of an TTRPG, but due to perfect storm of rise of YT, social media, and COVID it became insanely big in mainstream. And that, with Hasbro pushing hard on BG3 hype, did account for a lot of sales - cause BG3 in nutshell is a high budget CRPG for the mainstream audience, delivered through D&D 5e.
Wow. Baldur's Gate making more money than money than Starfield and Hogwarts, both games with higher budget. Pretty amazing, Larian must be rich now.
{insert Scrooge McDuck swimming in gold coins meme}
Considering the game was only on sale once (10 % at the end of the year) and the only DLC for it is a 10$ digital deluxe upgrade we can fairly accurately estimate 10-12m copies sold (this year) assuming this is correct. Throw in GOG and console sales and it might be close to 15m. Probably puts it in the top 5 for they year
and they probably wheren't expecting more than a few million sales total.
Good to hear bg3 is still selling well
Feel bad for star wars. That game deserves to be way ahead of starfield
Based on what very subjective opinion? Yours? :D
Jedi:Survivor was absolutely broken on PC for months after launch and is still super rough. It honestly didn’t deserve a single sale with that port.
Oh . I played it on ps5 without issues. Wasn't aware of pc woes
BG3 numbers look even more impressive when you take into account the sales within Steam. Starfield and Hogwarts were bundled with graphics cards and have a share of 35% and 28% of reviews coming from keys either GC codes or key sites while BG3 has just 11%.
I mean you are really working hard on this one :) I give you that
It's cute how this is the best you could come up with.
Essay Pro