The UK Video Game Market Is Worth A Staggering £7.6bn

The UK Video Game Market Is Worth A Staggering £7.6bn - a wedge of UK money

UKIE, the trade body behind British video games, has done the numbers and confirmed the UK video games market is worth a massive £7.6bn.

In a year where the silver screen and the great outdoors struggled to scrape through covid, the UK video games market did some serious numbers. The UKIE, the industry body affiliated with British video games, has jsut published a report that shows the appetite for digital adventures is still growing. This total comes to us just ahead of the London Games Week, where we will be booting up demos and chatting to some of our favorite devs, and marks a 1.9% increase on last year’s spending. This might sound small but 1.9% of £7.6bn is sizeable.

Much of the growth comes in line with the launch of next-generation consoles, and likely doesn’t even account for the grey market scalping that is, finally, starting to fall off. Between the demand for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X, and OLED Switch, the UK public shelled out £1.13bn on consoles alone.

UKIE UK Games Industry Infographic

 

We’ve included some of the infographics above, but the general trends are an increase in hardware sales, a slight decrease in software coming off the shelves, and a ridiculous 33.6% uptick in toy and licensed merch sales, up to £159m. That’s roughly 39849624 packs of Pokemon cards at RRP.

“The important story here is of how much of the lockdown-related boost seen in 2020 has been successfully retained during 2021’s year of correction,” said Steven Bailey, Senior Analyst, Games at Omdia, commenting on the digital games market.

We’ve got to agree, I spent more on hardware than I’d like to admit this past year and hopefully we will get to bring you the most promising games to play on our new kit when we attend London Games Week soon. You can view a detailed report at the UKIE site now.

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