Has 2023 been a good year for new games? | This Week in Business

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This Week in Business is our weekly recap column, a collection of stats and quotes from recent stories presented with a dash of opinion (sometimes more than a dash) and intended to shed light on various trends. Check every Friday for a new entry.

The end of the year is coming up over the horizon, and that means it's about time to start reflecting on the year that was.

And it was horrible, right? The pandemic bubble burst in a big way, the layoffs flowed like water, E3 collapsed, and the acquisition-hungry publisher that made such a big deal about preserving gaming's history executed Volition Games and we found out last week it's ready to do the same to another storied studio in Free Radical Design.

But if all you care about is the quality of new games – and to be clear, you should care about more than that – it was also great, right? Zelda! Spider-Man! Starfield! Diablo!

That's the conventional wisdom at least. But one thing we like to do around here is test the conventional wisdom to see how well it holds up. Because while it's often more-or-less accurate, conventional wisdom does tend to gloss over some important details.

That's why last year, after hearing for months about how terrible 2022 was for new games, we sifted through the US sales charts for a This Week in Business column to see if they would back that idea up. We combed through years of NPD monthly sales charts and added up how many new games had appeared in the Top 10 and Top 20 of those charts up through that point of each year (the October sales report), reasoning that would be a rough indicator of whether publishers had been consistently producing new games to appeal to the