UK gaming has never been worth so much money

Boxed retail games now make less money than both digital downloads and mobile apps, according to the latest figures.

Although we always cover the weekly software charts in the UK they’re pretty terrible at giving any real indication of what’s selling and how successful it is. Not only are there no sales figures but the charts only count retail, boxed sales – not digital downloads.

But trade body Ukie has released their annual report and found that as a whole the video game market in the UK saw its value increase by 1.2% in 2016, to a total worth of £4.33 billion.



For the first time ever combined software sales brought in more than £3 billion. Digital console and PC sales were up 11.1% to £1.22 billion, while mobile games revenues were up 16.9% to £995 million.


Predictably though, boxed sales were down. They dropped 15.2% from last year and made just £766.7 million in revenue. Meaning that both digital sales and mobile games make more money than games you buy from a traditional retailer like GAME or Amazon.

Bye bye boxed sales (Pic: Ukie)

You can read the full report here, if you’re so inclined, but other titbits include the fact that the virtual reality market has been valued for the first time, at £61.3 million. Ukie claims that this helped fuel a 64% increase in PC game hardware, worth £258 million.

By comparison home console sales were down by 26.7% to £507 million. Which seems a little surprising, especially considering the launch of the PS4 Pro, PS4 Slim, and Xbox One S last year. Ukie claim it’s normal for this point in a generation, but since we’ve never had a generation like this before we’re not convinced.

Why does all this matter? Well, because without any regular information on digital sales, to an outside observer it looks like the market for video games has been shrinking rapidly over the last several years. And yet here we can see it’s actually the opposite.

Should console sales really be down like that? (Pic: Ukie)

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