As numbers from Hogwarts Legacy’s opening weekend trickle in, it is becoming clearer how much of a huge release it is. The game is gradually throttling toward one of the top-selling titles of 2023. We just have to wait to see how well Diablo 4 and Call of Duty perform on launch.
Currently, it is dominating Valve’s Steam storefront, occupying the top four positions on Steam’s sales chart. Hogwarts Legacy has also smashed a handful of Twitch records—and it just shows how much fans have missed the series.
The game follows would-be Ravenclaws, Hufflepuffs, Slytherins, and Gryffindors as they arrive at the witchcraft and wizardry school to begin exploring the open-world RPG game.
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It is rare for Steam’s top four titles in a week to be the same game. The Hogwarts Legacy Deluxe Edition is sitting comfortably on the number one spot while the standard edition is in second and third place. Interestingly, the Deluxe Edition also sits in fourth place. This is possible due to stock-keeping units (SKUs).
Steam assigns unique reference numbers to games when they are listed and sold on the platform. These unique numbers—similar to barcodes—differentiate one product from another. Hogwarts Legacy’s early access Deluxe Edition and the standard editions have separate SKUs. Likewise, the full global release day editions have different SKUs too.
Therefore, the four different versions of Hogwarts Legacy—early access standard, early access Deluxe, launch day standard, and launch day Deluxe—all have different reference numbers on Steam. That explains why a single game could occupy four different positions on Steam.
The numbers from Hogwarts Legacy are simply insane
Perhaps, the success of Hogwarts Legacy has to do with the fact that players are allowed to build their own characters. For the first time, LGBTQ characters can be created in the game. This was controversial considering J.K. Rowling’s views on transgender.
Warner Bros Games said “J.K. Rowling is not directly involved in the creation of the game,” however, it is highly likely that she will get some royalties. Here are some of the records that Hogwarts Legacy has set so far.
- Hogwarts Legacy overtook Cyberpunk 2077 to set a streaming record as the single-player game with the most synchronized viewers in the history of Twitch.
- Hogwarts Legacy’s Early Access launch recorded 1.28 million concurrent streams making it the most ever for a single-player game. While some players were simply watching the game, others were scouting for Twitch drops.
On Sunday 12 February 2023, Hogwarts Legacy recorded over 879,000 players on Steam, just sitting behind Cyberpunk 2077 for most concurrent for a single-player game.
Cyberpunk 2077 recorded 13.7 million copies in its first three weeks after its release in 2020. However, it was dropped from the PS Store for six months following a disastrous console release. It had to gradually crawl to the top in September 2022.
Without a known bug, Hogwarts Legacy is well on its way to breaking those records. Unlike other games, Hogwarts Legacy will likely appeal to Harry Potter IP fans which will likely increase its range beyond hardcore gamers.
Developers release patch notes
Hogwarts Legacy’s development team has unveiled a long list of alterations that will be made in the first patch coming after the launch of the game on February 10. This is not unusual in recent years. Big titles usually receive updates in the form of patches to fix issues the developers may have discovered after the launch of a game or to improve its playability.
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Hogwarts Legacy’s first patch will attempt to fix known issues with the game’s PC version as well as the Xbox Series X and S. Some of the problems that will be corrected include cinematic performance, the game’s UI glitches, and stability.
Some of these issues were first spotted by the huge number of dedicated players. There were reported instances where quests failed to update the Wizard Portal. Issues were also spotted with non-playable characters.
The patch notes indicated that the aforementioned issues are now resolved including raytracing. Developers are openly calling on players to own the game and report any bug directly to Avalanche Software so that they can crank out the fix quickly. Below is the full detail of Hogwarts Legacy’ patch notes.
Bug Fixes:
General
- Online
- Fixed issues with achievement data being properly pushed to Wizarding World portal after linking.
Gameplay
- Owl Mail
- Fixed an issue with mail not properly triggering sequential mission.
- World Events
- Fixed rare crash around certain locations where in-game World Events spawning.
- NPC
- Fixed a rare crash when respawning NPCs in the world.
- Fixed crash with some NPC schedules.
- Characters
- Fixed issues with flickering occurring with a transparent head while hair is still present.
UI
- Updated localization text for additional content items.
- Added Build version to first time EULA.
- Fixed rare occurrence of mission descriptions not being displayed correctly.
Cinematics
- Corrected VFX presentation of robe transformation.
- Fixed a stability issue when skipping cutscenes.
- Fixed a crash when playing cutscenes and cinematics.
Save Game
- Fixed error of rewriting last autosave slot.
- Fixed an issue when restarting from last save around not being able to talk to a vendor after initial conversation. Resolves the following reported issues: HL-494, HL-246, HL-1063, HL-590, HL-542, HL-976, HL-965, HL-1158, HL-1184, HL-1089, HL-1240, HL-1031, HL-1490, HL-1433, HL-89, HL-1930, HL-1086, HL-1636, HL-1585, HL-1028, HL-1933, HL-2606, HL-2062, HL-1587, HL-488, HL-498, HL-162, HL-1706, HL-2626, HL-2865, HL-2888, HL-2804, HL-2910, HL-2944, HL-3000, HL-3043, HL-3024.
Performance and Stability
- Improved performance on Fidelity mode.
- Fixed rare crash around hovering over the map.
- Fixed issue with wind causing distortion and stretching of world assets.
- Fixed a rare occurrence with material swapping.
- Fixed a rare crash with map assets state.
- Fixed Rare crash occurring with in-game world events.
- Fixed a memory leak with global lighting system HL-313.
XSX
- Performance and Stability
- Improved crash collection to help chase rare crashes.
PC Steam/PC Epic Games
- Cinematics
- Fixed audio issues missing or not properly playing.
- Controllers
- Switch Pro controller support updates HL-346.
- Upscalers
- Enable frame generation while DLSS is disabled.
- Anti-Aliasing and Screen resolution settings disabled when using DLSS and not Super Resolution.
- Raytracing
- Fixed issue with RTAO looking worse than SSAO.
- Adjusted default setting to Medium Quality.
- Performance and Stability
- Shader type compilation optimization.
- Shader compilation performance updates and functionality enhancements.
- Fixed a crash affecting Text2Speech usability.
- Resolved issues with world assets abruptly being stretched which resolves the following reported issues: HL-305, HL-265.
- Resolved an issue with Nvidia GPUs having lower frame rate compared to AMD.
- DirectX Version 12
- Please note DirectX Version 12 is required to run Hogwarts Legacy on PC. We do not suggest attempting workarounds to run the game with DirectX Version 11 as this can cause stability issues with launching the game and the player experience.
