MW3, currently broken, was highest-selling US game in January—ahead of several new titles

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 was the best-selling game in January 2024, despite several high-profile releases in the same month.

MW3 beat out new titles like Tekken 8, Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, and Persona 3: Reload, according to Circana’s Mat Piscatella. The reporting period was from Dec. 30, 2023 through Feb. 3 of this year, and ranked physical and digital game sales from PlayStation, Xbox, and Steam.

The momentum for CoD is continuing into 2024 after it was once again the highest-selling franchise in the U.S. in 2023 for a 15th consecutive year, taking into account the numbers from both MW3 and Modern Warfare 2.

The timing of today’s sales report is admittedly quite humorous. The news from Circana came this morning as MW3 and Warzone, CoD’s current heavy-hitter titles, both massively struggled with bugs and error codes, including one that seemingly reset players’ levels and progress back to level one.

At time of writing, the CoD devs are currently working on a fix for the issues, but social media sentiment around the series, and MW3 and Warzone specifically, is about as vitriolic as you might expect. And the fact that the only thing working for some players was the in-game store only exacerbated the anger.

Regardless of the current situation, which should be fixed soon enough, CoD continues to sell well. And the numbers above don’t even take into account add-on content such as skins in the store or seasonal battle passes, so the revenues for the franchise continue to be astronomical.

MW3’s season two began earlier this month, and a third season is likely to begin at the start of April. New seasons will continue to release every two months up until the next CoD’s release, which is likely to drop sometime in October or November.