UKIE has published a report with lots of juicy statistics about the UK games industry during 2018 and the good news is that it was valued at a record £5.7bn, up a very impressive 10% compared to the previous year. However, where the money was made has changed quite considerably.
Sales of pre-owned games have crashed 30.8% due a number of factors including the rise of free-to-play titles, that more games are running as a service with a lengthy lifespan, and also the continuing movement of people choosing digital products over physical games. That said, sales of boxed products only dropped slightly, down -2.6% to £770m, but digital revenues exploded up +20.3% to a record £2.01bn.
Despite the fact that were closing on the end of a generation and no new consoles were released last year, hardware sales also had a record year up +10.7%. Of that +6.5% is attributed to consoles, so I guess people are picking up Switch as a second console or upgrading to a PS4 Pro on Xbox One X, and PC sales also saw a big boost.
Unfortunately there always has to be someone letting down the side and last year it was the VR market which slid-20.9% to £72m. This has been attributed to “early adopters await the next generation of headsets” but I think that’s more on the PC side of things, sales of PSVR are still strong.
In short, games are still making loads of money and both consoles and PC continue to thrive, not bad considering we were told consoles were dead a few years back. 2019 will be very interesting as Google steps in to the gaming market, will Stadia change how we play?
Source: UKIE
JR.
Seems to imply that digital sales (of actual games) are surpassing physical sales but I don’t believe this to be accurate at all.
Do the digital software stats include DLC / Microtransactions / Subscriptions etc.? This is important.
I think if you compared sales of actual games (available both digitally and physically) the split would be more likely 75/25 in favor of physical game sales. Even then, digital prices are often +30% more than physical games on release which distorts the stats somewhat.
I buy a lot more digital content now than I ever before but it’s usually ‘digital only’ games, DLC or heavily discounted games in the sales.
MrYd
Yes, the 2 billion includes DLC and microtransactions. But doesn’t mention subscriptions.
So if it’s around 60:40 for digital vs physical, but digital includes all that extra stuff and things for whatever this weeks popular free thing is, then just including full games must be at least your 75:25 guess. Take out the full games that are only available digitally, and adjust things for digital prices being silly, and it surely can’t be any less.