Data from the GSD institute reports that 34.2 million games were sold in the UK in 2022, this figure including boxed and download sales thanks to the participation of the main publishers (with the notable exception of Nintendo which does not share its digital sales). In detail, close to 20 million of these sales took place on download platforms (PlayStation Store, Microsoft Store, Nintendo eShop, Steam) while the physical market accounts for 14.2 million games sold. Overall, the decline in game sales is 6% compared to the year 2021.
FIFA and COD, locomotives at the rendezvous
The main reason for this decline is attributable to games released in previous years, as the main new releases of 2022 are doing overall with honors. The games released in 2022 indeed represent 13.9 million sales, which is 20% more than for the novelties of 2021, a year earlier. The statistics may surprise as the year 2022 seems to have lacked headlines, in particular at the end of the year, due to numerous postponements. Yes but now, FIFA and Call of Duty did not pretend. FIFA 23 saw its sales increase by another 4% compared to FIFA 22, while Modern Warfare 2 made up for the disappointment of Vanguard with sales up 67%. Unsurprisingly, the football game and the shooting game are the two best sellers of the year.
The triple of PlayStation Studios games
Add to that the Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Purple duo which outperforms the Sparkling Diamond & Sparkling Pearl duo by 36%, but also the excellent year of PlayStation Studios games with God of War Ragnarok (6th best-selling of the year), Horizon Forbidden West (8th) and Gran Turismo 7 (13th). The other boxes of the year are called LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga, which is just ahead of Elden Ring in a top 5 which also includes the immortal GTA 5. On Switch, it is finally Nintendo Switch Sports which achieves the better performance in that Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Purple are counted here as two different games.
The Callisto Protocol and A Plague Tale: Requiem among the losers
Notable top 20 absentees include NBA 2K23 (22nd), Gotham Knights (25th), Saints Row (28th), Kirby and the Forgotten World (31st), Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands (35th), Splatoon 3 (38th) and Football Manager 2023 (45th), recalling again that Nintendo games are penalized by the lack of downloads. Besides, games like The Callisto Protocol, Ghostwire: Tokyo, Rainbow Six Extraction, Marvel’s Midnight Suns, Two Point Campus, Stranger of Paradise: Final Fantasy Origin and A Plague Tale: Requiem don’t even make the top 100.
Games Industry also observes that the growth of dematerialized consumption has slowed sharply in 2022. “Looking only at games released in both digital and physical form (thus excluding all digital-only games), 66% of games sold in the UK last year were downloaded. In 2021, this figure was 65%. This figure follows significant growth in digital downloading during the 2020s and 2021s, the years of the COVID-19 lockdowns.“, can we read.
General disappointment for console sales
With 2 million machines sold over the year, console sales show a sharp drop of 29% compared to 2021. A frankly disappointing result insofar as we expected a significant improvement in PS5 stocks and Xbox Series. However, if this was clearly the case in certain territories such as the United States and Japan, the United Kingdom (and even more generally Europe) were not properly serviced.
Because as much as the drop in sales of Switch (- 27.5%) can be understood, the console being in the process of finishing its 6th year, as much the results of the PS5 (- 33%) and the Xbox Series (- 15% ) are real anomalies for such young machines. Notable detail, the three consoles are held in a pocket handkerchief: less than 60,000 sales separate the Switch, the PS5 and the Xbox Series, in that order.
Finally, sales of accessories also recorded a drop of 13% compared to 2021, which represents 9.22 million sales of controllers and other headsets. The white and black DualSense controllers are the best-selling accessories of the year.
