Crash Bandicoot rescues UK retail market in June Activision's remake was the No.1 game after just two days on sale

Christopher Dring Head of Games B2B Thursday 6th July 2017 Share this article Share

Companies in this article Activision Blizzard

Crash Bandicoot N.Sane Trilogy was the UK's best-selling boxed game for the month of June, despite only being on sale for two days.

In fact it did it comfortably, more than doubling the sales of the second-placed game: Tekken 7 (GfK/UKIE data).

Activision's remake of the first three Crash games was so successful it actually prevented what was set to be a terrible month for the UK boxed market, made worse by a disappointing E3 and GAME's recent profit warning. Physical game revenue rose 4% in June this year compared with last year to £35.4m, while the number of games sold rose 9% to 1,251,712 units sold. Activision Blizzard accounted for 16.5% of all the physical games sold last month and 13% of the revenue.

Indeed, Crash's first week sales even surpassed that of Horizon: Zero Dawn, which was the previous fastest-selling single-format release of the year.

Outside of Crash and Tekken, Dirt 4 races in at No.6, while another old brand Wipeout: Omega Collection slips in at No.9. Nintendo's new IP Arms debuts at No.15 for the month, and another racing game in the form of Micro Machines: World Series makes No.23 (that game was also released right at the end of June).

Further down the charts are The Elder Scrolls Online: Morrowind (No.30), Star Trek Bridge Crew (No.42), Dead by Daylight (No.46) Elite Dangerous (No.49) and Moto GP 3 (No.50).

Yet you could sell under 5,000 units to break the Top 50 this week, and you only needed a little more than 21,000 copies sold to reach the Top Ten. Three of the games in the Top Ten have been on sale for over a year, including Rocket League (No.10), Overwatch (No.5) and GTA V (No.3). The latter title has actually been on sale for a huge 46 months.

PS4 accounted for over 55% of the games sold last month, Xbox One is at No.2 with 28.4%, while Switch - which has a significantly smaller install base - is at No.3 with 5.7%.

Looking ahead to July, and there isn't a huge number of PS4 or Xbox One games that will likely benefit the market, aside from some promising indie and typically digital-friendly releases (like Team17's Aven Colony and Epic Games' Fortnite). The big publisher of the month is unquestionably Nintendo, which will release Splatoon 2 on Switch followed by a new version of the 3DS (the New 2DS) along with three games - the long delayed Dr Kawashima's Devilish Brian Training, Hey, Pikmin! and Miitopia.

Here is the UKIE/GfK Top 20 for June: