Since the arrival of video games in the 1980s, we have all had the joy of knowing physical gameswith cardboard boxes, cartridges, floppy disks, CDs, then plastic boxes with our HD-DVDs and Blu-Rays and above all, sometimes generous content with booklets and other stickers, becoming real gems for collectors.
Unfortunately, in recent years, physical games are becoming more and more basicwith the bare minimum in terms of content. With the mass arrival of subscription plans and “all digital”, the physical games market has collapsed year after year for the benefit of digital games sold on the PlayStation Store, the Xbox Store and the Nintendo eShop. And the year 2024 is no exception to the rule, unfortunately.
Physical games market collapses in UK
Europe is a very important territory for the video game industry and reveals trends. In the lead, the United Kingdom which often serves as a reference. So, the figures for the year 2024 are very worrying. We learn through VGC that sales of physical games decreased by 35% over the whole year compared to 2023. Revenues generated by physical games thus fall to £324 million (or approximately 388.4 million euros).
For its part, the digital games market also saw a fall of only 1%. Although we expect a historic year 2025 with the launch of the next Nintendo console and the arrival, if all goes well, of Grand Theft Auto VIit is quite worrying to see how much the market share of physical games is shrinking from year to year.
We learn that the entire video game industry and sales experienced a decline in 2024 with:
- -5% on PC download sales
- -15% on download sales on consoles
- -2.6% on download sales on mobile phones
- -12% on subscription revenue (Game Pass, PS Plus etc…)
Despite this, Kim Barley, the director of theEntertainment Retailers Associationbelieves that despite the drop, this data is not negative for the video game industry. After the dizzying growth that the industry has experienced with Covid, it is normal for the figures to drop. However, video games still remain the world’s leading industry and are likely to experience significant growth from 2025. We hope that this will affect physical games too.
Source: www.journaldugeek.com
