Minecraft Legends launched last week, and early signs are very promising, with first-week player counts rivalling the opening periods of some of 2023’s most successful launches to date, according to our Xbox player data.This week’s Xbox Gameplay Chart sees Mojang’s strategy spin-off debut just below the perennial original Minecraft in the top five, making it only the fifth new release to break the top five so far this year. Digging a little deeper into that first-week data, we discover that Legends has enjoyed the third-biggest Xbox launch of the year so far, with only the expected wild success of Hogwarts Legacy and Game Pass surprise sensation Atomic Heart pulling in a greater share of players, according to the same player pool of almost 2.5 million active Xbox accounts we use to power our weekly charts.Minecraft Legends is one of 2023’s biggest Xbox launches so far, data suggestsMojang’s new game, which we described as “a fun and compelling action-strategy game” in our Minecraft Legends review, has been one of only three games this year to pull in more than 10% of all active players in that massive sample pool of ours. 10.3% of accounts from our data already jumped in for some strategic Piglin wrangling — a decent way ahead of the likes of Monster Hunter Rise and the nostalgia-fuelled arrival of GoldenEye 007 when the pair came to Game Pass in January with almost exactly 9% of accounts a piece playing them in week one. Even other Game Pass success stories from this year so far haven’t come close to cutting themselves that large a slice of the Xbox player base, with Wo Long hitting 8.1% and Hi-Fi Rush coming in at 6.8% in their opening weeks. As mentioned, we’ve seen just two stronger launches than Legends so far this year, where we see sizeable jumps in the opposite direction — Hogwarts Legacy was on 11.8% of accounts in week one, while Atomic Heart stormed into Game Pass to be played by an impressive 13.8% of players in our sample.While we naturally can’t tell from our data which Xbox players have bought a game and which are playing via Game Pass, we can comfortably assume that the subscription service is doing a lot of the heavy lifting here, since looking at the PlayStation numbers shows a familiar trend that we’ve seen several times this year already following other games coming to Game Pass. TrueTrophies’ PlayStation Gameplay Chart shows that Minecraft Legends didn’t even get a sniff of the action this week and couldn’t even get close to the top 40 despite launching on PS5 and Ps4 on the same day as Xbox — previous Game Pass additions have seen similar indicators that the service was heavily skewing the numbers in Xbox’s favour, such as Atomic Heart’s failure to find a top 40 spot on the PlayStation chart in its first week while being the biggest Xbox drop of 2023 so far on the Xbox side, while Wo Long only scraped into the top 30 on PlayStation in its first week despite the studio’s previous Nioh games being popular PS exclusives.What do you make of Minecraft Legends so far? Let us know below!
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