A new study has claimed to reveal the 10 most anticipated video game releases of 2023, with notable titles like Hogwarts Legacy and Starfield mentioned on the list. 2022 has been a strong year for video games, with landmark releases like Elden Ring and God of War Ragnarok, but so far 2023 is shaping up to be even bigger. Many major games that were originally scheduled to launch in 2022 wound up being pushed to next year, making 2023 especially stacked when it comes to new releases.
The new video games coming in the first half of 2023 alone would be enough to make next year one to remember, but it's worth remembering that there should be even more games in the second half of the year as well. Some of those games likely haven't even been announced yet, so gamers don't even know everything they have to look forward to in the year ahead.
In an effort to determine the 10 most anticipated games of 2023, the site Top10Casinos took a list of upcoming games created by PCGamer and then used Ahrefs to collect global search data about each game. The titles were then ranked by global search volume to determine which new 2023 games people are looking forward to the most. According to the results, open world Harry Potter action-RPG Hogwarts Legacy is 2023's most-anticipated game, followed by Bethesda's Starfield in second place.
Most-Anticipated Games 2023
- Hogwarts Legacy - 1.23 million searches
- Starfield - 540,000 searches
- Diablo 4 - 301,000 searches
- Sons of the Forest - 224,000 searches
- Baldur's Gate 3 - 206,000 searches
- Forspoken - 192,000 searches
- The Day Before - 187,000 searches
- Blue Protocol - 185,000 searches
- Resident Evil 4 - 161,000 searches
- The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom/Ark 2 - 154,000 searches
Third place went to Diablo 4, while fourth place went to horror survival sequel Sons of the Forest. Fifth place went to Baldur's Gate 3, the long-awaited third entry in the classic RPG franchise that's currently in development at Larian Studios. Square Enix's new IP Forspoken nabbed the sixth spot, whereas horror MMO The Day Before managed to get the seventh spot.
Blue Protocol, a game that was just freshly announced at The Game Awards, took eighth place. The highly-anticipated Resident Evil 4 remake got ninth place, whereas 10th place was apparently a tie between The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom and Ark 2. Some gamers may be scratching their heads at these results, but there are certainly flaws with the methodology that could have skewed things. For example, the data was collected on December 19, so games that were recently promoted at The Game Awards had a greater chance of being searched on Google.
As far as Tears of the Kingdom goes, it's quite likely that the data for it was skewed. "Breath of the Wild 2" was used to collect the data for it, but the Tears of the Kingdom title has been known about for quite some time, and at this point, it's safe to say that there are many fans who are searching for info on the game using the official title. Regardless, this still provides a decent idea of the games fans are looking forward to in 2023, and it will be exciting to see which ones manage to live up to the hype.
Source: Top10Casinos, PCGamer