UKIE: UK boom means 1 in 3 is now a gamer

Last week was the biggest-grossing week ever for the UK games market – with 113.8m made in seven days.

And the extra effect of this market boom? There are more gamers over here than ever before.

According to UKIE, now one in three people in the UK is a gamer.

Two key releases arrived in the last seven days to satisfy both core gamers and a growing mass market audience – Call of Duty: Black Ops, and Microsoft’s Kinect device.

Michael Rawlinson, director general of UKIE said: The video games and interactive entertainment industry has already seen a great start to quarter 4 2010 and the success of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Microsoft’s Kinect adds to this.

"The positive sales figures of titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops, new hardware launches like Kinect, the emergence of casual/mobile games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope and social networking games such as Farmville show that video games and other forms of interactive entertainment continue to be played by more people than ever – with 1 in 3 people in the UK now being gamers.”

Given the huge audiences for games on all formats, 2010 has been a year of unprecedented activity and focus. And with more video games than ever before being played, on an ever growing range of games consoles, PCs, mobile phones, mobile devices and internet enabled TVs, the industry has widened beyond all expectations and will continue to expand exponentially in 2011."