Why four of Steam’s top five sellers are Hogwarts Legacy

Steam has released its sales charts for the week just gone (opens in new tab), broken down here by SteamDb (opens in new tab), and Hogwarts Legacy has sold extremely well. It was clear from the game’s early access period that there was a big appetite for some open-world wizardry (opens in new tab), with the game even breaking Twitch records for viewership in the runup to release, but even so it’s striking to see that Hogwarts Legacy occupies four of the top five slots in Steam’s best sellers for the week.

The reason why is that Steam treats each SKU, which is to say version of the game, as a distinct product. Thus the top seller is Hogwarts Legacy: Digital Deluxe Edition, which puts the previous week’s best-seller, plain old Hogwarts Legacy, down to second position. But then both products seem to appear again in the third and fourth spots. This is because, for whatever reason, Steam categorises the pre-order sales and the release sales as distinct products. So the top two sellers are people buying the game before release, and the next two are those who bought it once it was out.