UK games market suffers January dip

Over half a million fewer games were sold in the UK last month compared with January 2010.

It marks a 13.4 per cent dip year-on-year in unit sales for UK games retail, while the market value has fallen 7.9 per cent to 84.6m.

Chart-Track director Dorian Bloch pointed to a lack of new releases early in the month as contributing to the drop in sales. LittleBigPlanet 2 didn’t reach shelves until January 21st, while Dead Space 2 arrived on January 28th.

The biggest selling game of the month was EA’s FIFA 11, followed closely by Activision’s Call of Duty: Black Ops and Ubisoft’s Just Dance 2.

Electronic Arts was comfortably the biggest publisher of January. The firm had a 17.9 per cent share of the software market in terms of units (Ubisoft was in second place with a 14.1 per cent share), while in terms of value EA had a 19.2 per cent share (Ubisoft second again with 13.7 per cent).

Xbox 360 remains the most successful console in terms of software sales, but PlayStation 3 is catching it up. PS3 games accounted for a 27.6 per cent share of the market value last month, with Xbox 360 still in the lead with a 32.5 per cent share.

To read a full analysis of the January charts, click here.