UK Games Market at Retail Drops 2.8% in 2018, Hardware Sales Up - News

by William D'Angelo , posted on 02 January 2019 / 2,018 Views

UK boxed video game sales generated £770 million in 2018, according to GfK and UKIE. That is a 2.8 percent decline compared to 2017. The total number of games sold in 2018 was at 22 million, a drop of 7.1 percent.

The Nintendo Switch was the only platform to see software sales increase year-on-year, which isn't a surprise as it was only available for 10 months in 2017. Software sales for the platform increased 90.1 percent over 2017, while revenue increased 73.4 percent. Software sales for the PlayStation 4 dropped 9.7 percent and 12.7 percent for the Xbox One.

Several key titles saw sales lower than previous releases in the franchises, including Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII, Fallout 76, FIFA 19 and Battlefield V.

FIFA 19, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops IIII were the three best-selling games in 2018.

The PlayStation 4 accounted for 42.2 percent of the total games sold in 2018, while the Xbox One accounted for 30.5 percent and the Nintendo Switch for 24 percent. The rest was made of the Nintendo 3DS (2.1%), Windows PC, (0.7%) Wii (0.2%), and Xbox 360 (0.2%).

Official hardware numbers have not been released, however, GamesIndustry has revealed more consoles were sold in 2018 than in 2017. The PlayStation 4 saw an increase in sales with over one million units sold, while the Nintendo Switch saw sales jump 20 percent year-on-year. No information on the Xbox One was revealed. Overall, just below 2.5 million gaming consoles were sold in the UK in 2018.

A life-long and avid gamer, William D'Angelo was first introduced to VGChartz in 2007. After years of supporting the site, he was brought on in 2010 as a junior analyst, working his way up to lead analyst in 2012. He has expanded his involvement in the gaming community by producing content on his own YouTube channel and Twitch channel dedicated to gaming Let's Plays and tutorials. You can contact the author at wdangelo@vgchartz.com or on Twitter @TrunksWD.

1 Comments

Bofferbrauer2 (on 03 January 2019)

So, everything overtracked here? Up to December 8, VGChartz has it already at 2.7M. Granted, this is including 3DS and Vita, but even if we remove those, we're still over 2.5M instead of slightly below. Switch is already those mentioned 20% up and the PS4 is already past the million mark, so basically what we have now is supposed to be at the end of the year give or take, not December 8.