Another all-time low for UK games retail

The struggle faced by UK retail has reached its lowest point to-date when just 8.18m was generated by software sales last week.

However, despite the drop, it isn’t the lowest week in terms of the number of games sold. Not that it is a particularly high figure, with just 396,526 video games sold.

The previous ‘lowest ever’ figure was 8.4m just two weeks ago. The market bounced back a week later thanks to big sales of Sega’s Olympics games.

It does highlight the plight UK games retail faces at the moment as sales ground to a halt this summer. A string of reasons are to blame: the lack of new releases, the summer of events such as Olympics, Euros and Jubilee, the global economic recession, the move towards digital and, of course, fewer games retailers actually on the High Street.

But although it is easy to dwell on the negatives, the UK market can probably begin to look upwards again from now on in. Today (that’s Friday, August 17th) the combined effort of Square Enix’s Sleeping Dogs and Nintendo’s Super Mario Bros 2 is likely to lift the market.

And then the new releases come thick and fast as we tumble into the traditionally important Christmas sales period.

MCV tracks the market value every single week in MCV Magazine. Which you can subscribe to right here.

All data is courtesy of UKIE/GfK Chart-Track.