We all knew the games industry was big but it seems that consumer UK games spending has hit nearly $10 billion this year!
This staggering figure is part of a wider report just revealed by the UKIE, The Association for UK Interactive Entertainment. The industry body for the UK gaming sector dropped the details on us yesterday and after perusing the findings, the numbers are certainly impressive. We all knew that with lockdown and two new console releases, we’d all be out there flashing the credit card to keep ourselves amused. Despite that knowledge, the UK consumer games market was worth £7bn / $9.756bn for 2020; a 29.9% increase on 2019’s market and over £1bn higher than 2018’s previous record total of £5.7bn. That’s some serious spending.
Big Spender
Taken in comparison, that means that UK consumers spent significantly more than the £1.25bn they dropped in the box office during 2019, the last uninterrupted year of revenue growth for film spend. The report breaks down this number too. We can see that the launches of the Xbox Series S/X and PlayStation 5 in November played an important role in pushing console hardware revenues up 74.8% year on year, according to data supplied by GfK Entertainment. However, the Nintendo Switch generated the largest share of console hardware revenue, with the launch of Animal Crossing: New Horizons in March 2020 at the onset of lockdown a major driver.
This isn’t the whole figure, however. Gaming isn’t just plugging in and waiting for that Xbox logo to load any more. Merchandising and toy sales of gaming related products jumped 22.4% and streaming related content made up a whopping £45.6m of subscriptions and donations for our online enjoyment. Unfortunately, Covid-19 has had a massive hit on venue based gaming entertainment, whether it’s DOTA tournaments or video game orchestras. That dropped a whopping 97% this year.
If nothing else, it’s both inevitable confirmation of what we all would have expected, at least before the scalpers, bots, and stock shortages of this year’s console and card launches./ You can check out more about the full UKIE report on UK consumer games spending here.
