Sega Europe top of the league

Europe is now Sega’s biggest boxed games market, thanks to the continued performance of Football Manager 2011.

The management sim has now sold 690,000 units in Europe and the US across PSP and PC. Sega’s European chief Jurgen Post says the game’s success has helped Europe shift more games than its US and Japanese counterparts.

For the first nine months of Sega’s fiscal year, the firm sold 5.95m games in Europe, 5.77m games in the US and 1.9m in Japan.

As ever we are fortunate because we’ve had Football Manager, which is only just getting started in the US,” Post told MCV.

If the US had a title like Football Manager, then our sales would have been the same. Sometimes the US sells a few more copies than us, sometimes they don’t. There’s always a big competition.”

Despite a slowdown in PC boxed game sales, Football Manager at retail continues to post similar numbers year-on-year. And thanks to the rise in digital downloading, the total number is rising.

Football Manager 2011 is in line with previous releases in the series. But if you include download numbers then it’s slightly going up. We’re really happy with that. This is one of those titles that is an all-time seller.”