The arrival of several big new releases wasn’t enough to help grow the market week-on-week, with the UK games retail market value falling 14 per cent to £12.7m. Unit sales dropped 12 per cent to 535,578.
EA’s fantasy RPG Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoningwas the best- selling video game of the week, though it was a close call between Final Fantasy XIII-2which dropped to No.2. Horror shooter The Darkness IIdebuted at No.3.
Week Ending February 4th
So far the boxed market has generated £27.6m from game sales in February. If the current sales trend continues, you can expect a slight dip in revenue this month over January’s total £59.2m value, which itself represented a 30 per cent drop over December 2011.
Week Ending February 11th
One new launch hoping to reverse the downturn is Sony’s PlayStation Vita, which arrives next week (Wednesday, February 22nd). This should help lift the market after a string of disappointing weeks.
2012 started brightly for games and consoles TV advertising. The first two full weeks produced remarkable year-on-year growth (52 per cent and 2,498 per cent).
The extraordinary growth witnessed during the week ending January 15th reflects a very poor corresponding week in 2011, when a small base of just three campaigns produced 10 TVRs, compared to 14 campaigns producing 252 TVRs in 2012. A TVR represents one per cent of a target audience. This can go over 100 if the same person watched an advert more than once.
100
The two weeks succeeding this period tempered expectations by producing year-on-year reductions in activity (-58 per cent and -52 per cent accordingly). These reductions were caused by a lack of heavyweight activity. In 2011, Dead Space 2, Art Academyand LittleBigPlanet 2all achieved over 100 TVRs across the two-week period. By comparison, the most viewed game in 2012, Just Dance 3, achieved 54 TVRs. That game has achieved 172 TVRs for the year-to-date.