Games bigger than music and video, represented over 50% of UK entertainment market in 2018

The Entertainment Retailers Association released its annual report today and reported that the UK entertainment market, which comprises music, video and games, reached an all time high of £7.537bn in 2018. Digital accounted for 76.1 per cent of entertainment sales value in 2018, with streaming services leading that growth.

Looking into games figures more specifically (provided by GfK, IHS Markit and GSD), digital sales represented 80.1 per cent of game revenues in 2018 – a figure that’s well above the digital share for video (72.3 per cent) and music (71.3 per cent). ERA reported that games is “biggest winner in entertainment’s digital transformation” and for the first time, games represented more than half of the entertainment market as a whole in the UK in 2018 (51.3 per cent to be precise).

Correcting the figure previously announced by GfK in its weekly report, ERA revealed that the boxed market for games was valued at £769.9m in 2018, a slight 2.8 per cent drop year-on-year, while digital growth was “modest by recent standards”: 12.5 per cent year-on-year, reaching £3bn. 

Combining digital and physical, the games market was worth £3.864bn in 2018 (a 9.1 per cent growth year-on-year), with ERA noting that it has more than doubled in value since 2007, thanks to digital. That means that, overall, games made more than music and video combined in 2018 in the UK.

The best selling physical games of 2018 were FIFA 19, Red Dead Redemption 2 and Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, ERA reported, using GfK figures:

ERA CEO Kim Bayley commented: “The games industry has been incredibly effective in taking advantage of the potential of digital technology to offer new and compelling forms of entertainment. Despite being the youngest of our three sectors, it is now by far the biggest.”