The days of video games being a niche hobby in the UK are long gone with the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) reporting the industry is worth £3.86bn, which makes it worth more than the UK music and film industry combined.
“The games industry has been incredibly effective in taking advantage of the potential of digital technology to offer new and compelling forms of entertainment,” said Chief executive of ERA, Kim Bayley. “Despite being the youngest of our three sectors, it is now by far the biggest.”
FIFA, Red Dead and COD are some of the titles helping to generate the revenue and interestingly the figures do not include mobile games and free-to-play titles, such as Fortnite. Factor those in and the numbers would be astronomical.
Despite the popularity of video games coverage is still rather sparse in mainstream media. Newspapers have started running weekly games columns but coverage on TV is non existent, but there are plenty of shows covering movies and music.
Source: BBC
