Monday 04 January 2011 – London, United Kingdom – Last year, 2010, was another strong year for the UK video games and interactive entertainment industry, with annual sales figures of £1.53bn (entertainment software, pc & console games).
Total sales of console videogame software amounted to £1.45bn, with growth in 2 formats, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and Sony’s PS3. The total revenue for console hardware sales amounted to £800m.
In terms of revenue the hardware market was headed by Microsoft’s Xbox 360 generating £232m, closely followed by Sony’s PS3 with revenue of £229m. Combined hardware units for these 2 platforms was 2.3m, the same as the 52 comparable weeks of 2009.
UK Xbox 360 sales more than doubled in the aftermath of Kinect’s 10th November launch, but according to UK hardware sales figures obtained by Eurogamer, neither PS3 or Wii registered a noticeable slump.
“360 doubled last week [in the UK when the Kinect launched] and it was already selling a lot. Wii and PS3 have been beaten by 360 consistently over the past few months. Wii is still outselling PS3 – the numbers are going the wrong way for Nintendo year-on-year but it’s certainly not a disaster.” – Unnamed senior publishing source
Monday 15 November 2010 – London, United Kingdom – UKIE/GFK Chart-Track announce biggest grossing week of all time for video games software sales.
Week 45, 2010 has become the biggest grossing week of all time for video games software in the UK (£113.8m total UK entertainment software market estimate) – the previous best was £107.6m back in week 52, 2008.
Activision Blizzard’s ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops’ exploded into the All Formats Chart (360/PS3/PC/Wii/DS) and is by far the biggest ever launch of any game, recording a staggering 2m units in the UK over 5 days and generating an estimated £81.9m. This is up 13% in units over previous record breaker ‘Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2’ (1.8m) and up 21% in terms of revenue (£67.4m for MW2).
“Move sold well and continues to sell well. [250,000 Moves in the UK by the time Kinect launches – with half a million sold by Christmas] It is all about getting the device in people’s hands and we still need to keep doing that. It has been a real success for us, we’re pretty much through quarter of a million units and we expect to sell half a million before Christmas. And when you have half a million advocates showing it to their friends and family, you will soon learn if you have a success or not.” – SCE UK marketing director Alan Duncan
Move has had “very significant sales in the first month since launch, somewhere in the region of 1.5 million units for the new controller across just Europe,” House [Andrew House, head of SCEE] said. “The initial sales response has been so far in excess of our initial plan that we’ll probably be looking at accelerating production.”
PlayStation 3 sales are somewhere around 16m units in Europe (as of late August), so this would place the Move install base at about 9% or so. That is certainly a much better start than what I expected.
Nintendo revealed in a press release announcing their UK celebrity spokespeople that the one in three UK households contains a Wii console. The sales data, supplied by GfK Chart-Track, also showed that one in six households own a Nintendo DS.
