UK games retail suffers disappointing 2015, as software sales tumble 6%

More than 28m physical games were sold in the UK last year, a drop of six per cent over 2014.

That’s according to the latest figures from GfK Chart-Track. These numbers are actually all the more disappointing, because Chart-Track’s weekly data actually counted 53 weeks of 2015, whereas 2014 had just 52 weeks.

PS4 and Xbox One software sales rose sharply for the year, but big declines on Xbox 360 and PS3 pulled the overall market downwards. Wii U game sales increased slightly.

Because of the increase in sales of higher-margin Xbox One and PS4 titles, UK physical software sales revenue reached 928m for 2015, which is a smaller drop of 2.2 per cent over 2014.

These figures only count physical retail sales, digital numbers are not included, so the overall market picture may be healthier (and is, in fact, likely to be).

But, in better news for games retail, there were four games released last year that sold over 1m copies. FIFA 16 was the best-selling game of the year, followed by a resurgent Call of Duty: Black Ops III, Bethesda’s Fallout 4 and Star Wars: Battlefront, which reached 1m sales by the end of the year.