In 2023, Hogwarts Legacy, published by Warner Bros Gaming, was the top-selling video game in the United States based on dollar sales. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III (2023) was in second place, followed by the sports game Madden NFL 24.
The dominance of AAA gaming productions
In the video-game industry, AAA (pronounced Triple-A) is a classification that is used when describing or talking about video games that are produced and distributed by major or mid-tier video game developers. These game productions typically have a large development and marketing budget. When looking at the top-selling video games in the United States in 2023, the majority of the best-selling titles were produced by the biggest gaming companies worldwide.
In addition to several publicly listed video game companies, gaming platform owners Sony and Nintendo also produce top-selling games with Sony's Marvel's Spider-Man 2 and Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom also reaching rank four and five, respectively.
Spotlight: Call of Duty series
Activision Blizzard’s long-running Call of Duty franchise usually features in many end-of-the-year lists as it is one of the top-grossing and best-selling gaming franchises worldwide. As of April 2021, the Call of Duty (CoD) series has generated more than 400 million lifetime unit sales and the most recent entry in the series is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare III, which was released in November 2023. The annual releases of the game series are rotated between several game development studios which are subsidiaries of Activision Blizzard: Infinity Ward, Sledgehammer Games, Treyarch, and Raven Software.
