Although 2020 was a rough year financially for a number of industries, gaming managed to ship some massively successful titles over the last 12 months. From The Last of Us 2’s dominant early sales to Animal Crossing: New Horizons managing to remain at the top of the charts for months on end, several studios delivered widely successful games in spite of the difficulties imposed by the pandemic.
It seems the UK wound up making a lot of money off of video games throughout the year, with a new report from the Entertainment Retailers Association (ERA) revealing that video games earned the country a record-breaking £4.2 billion in revenue last year. Until now, Britain’s revenue for video games had never breached the £4 billion mark, even with the medium consistently being the highest-grossing entertainment industry in the country since 2013.
According to ERA, the vast majority of this money was made through digital purchases, with £3.6 billion coming from mobile, PC, and console downloads. Interestingly, the site reveals that the figure was 16.3% higher than 2019’s digital sales. Meanwhile, physical sales contributed £598.5 million to the overall revenue, which was 4.6% higher than 2019’s figures. All in all, it seems as though the pandemic drove more sales to video games than years prior, with consumers looking for experiences to whittle the time away while stuck in quarantine.
Alongside revealing the figures, ERA also showcased which games sold the most throughout 2020, with the candidates shocking no one. In top place was FIFA 21, which is unsurprising considering the annual sports franchise is a big moneymaker for the UK, consistently topping the sales charts over the last few years. In total, it shifted 2.18 million units since its debut in October.
It was followed by Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War, which sold 1.42 million units, Grand Theft Auto 5, which sold 1.12 million units, FIFA 20, which sold 903,000 units, and Call of Duty: Modern Warfare, which sold 897,000 units. Further entries in the list see the likes of Animal Crossing: New Horizons and The Last of Us 2 doing big numbers, showing that both single-player and multiplayer experiences were big hits in the country.
As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to grip the world, it’ll be interesting to see whether the UK’s video game boom continues into 2021. The country recently announced it would be embracing its third nation-wide lockdown, so there will undeniably be players looking to hop onto their consoles and play some brand new games while they wait for a vaccine to be distributed.
Source: Entertainment Retailers Association
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