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News: Record 2008 game sales in UK
Created: 12-01-2009 06:14

Record 2008 Game Sales in UK

Despite the economic climate it was a very good year for the games industry in 2008. An impressive total of 82.8 million games were sold in the UK in 2008!
  1. The Wii is top in game sales (no surprise there) with over 24% of all games sold - just over 20 million. This generated £481 million and the Wii holds the top three selling games.
  2. Second was the DS with 23% of all games sold - just over 19 million. This generated £366 million. This one surprised me a bit considering the enormous piracy of DS titles but definitely added to a good year for Nintendo.
  3. Third was the Xbox360 with almost 18% of all games sold - just under 15 million. This generated £443 million.
  4. In forth place as expected is the PS3 - BUT, which may come as a surprise to some of the fear mongers out there, it accounts for over 12.5% of all games sold - 10.4 million, so its not that far behind. This generated £334 million for Sony. Best of all this represents a whopping 145% increase in game sales from 2007, i.e. almost 2 and a half times the number of games sold compared to the year before. Pretty darn good if you ask me. Plus the PS3 version of GTA IV from Rockstar holds the number 7 spot in the top 10 of games sold in 2008. The top 5 were all Nintendo titles.
With the demise of EUK (part of the Woolworths group) who distributed computer games along with DVDs etc. to around 60% of UK retailers, it will hopefully mean even more sales for the independent games shops and chains this year. I have always considered it a good thing to support the little guys (even those not so little like GAME and Gamestation) who specialise in game sales rather than the supermarkets. With EUK supplying stores like ASDA, Sainsburys, WH Smith and Zavvi (whose demise is also due in large part to EUKs fall) they will have to either find other big distributors or source games themselves from the publishers. We shall have to wait and see how it affects the availability of games on the high street but it hurt a lot of stores over the Christmas period.

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