UK SOFTWARE SALES MONITOR Your weekly guide to the UK games software market
WEEKLY MARKET VALUE:
£9.9m No. 1
12 Week ending July 6th, 2012 8 4
£8.6m 382,178 Units
£10.2m
432,107 Units
£9.9m 484,005 Units
0
Despite a brief uplift last week, the UK games market has begun to sink again. Retail sales generated £9.9m for the week ending July 7th – a decline of three per cent from the £10.2m taken in the previous week.
However, unit sales actually rose by one per cent, now up to 484,005. This was driven by current hits such as London 2012 and Amazing Spider-Manas well as a handful of new releases.
Week Ending June 23rd
Week Ending June 30th
LEGO Batman 2: DC Super Heroesholds onto No.1 for a third week running. The highest placing new entry was Dead Island: Game of the Year Editionat No.5, followed by Square Enix’s Theatrhythm: Final Fantasy at No.19.
Week Ending July 6th
New releases are once again thin on the ground today (Friday, July 13th), although hopefully retailers will see a solid performance from Namco Bandai’s latest action game Inversion.
“Sony and Microsoft cannot let retailers dictate game prices if they want to break free from the current over-priced model. PS4 and Xbox 720 need to be digital
only, or they will fail.” Codemasters co-founder David Darling calls for platform holders to reject physical media
2012’S BIGGEST CAMPAIGNS REVEALED
Generation Media takes a look at the most viewed TV ad campaigns for video games from the first half of the year
MOST VIEWED GAMES & CONSOLES TV CAMPAIGNS JANUARY 1ST JAN – JUNE 27TH 2012
There have been 86 games and consoles TV campaigns year-to-date (January 1st to June 27th), amassing a total of 6,958 individual TVRs (a decline of 48 per cent year-on-year). The Top Ten (left) accounted for 36 per cent of the total market activity.
XBOX 360 KINECT 366.7 MARIO & SONIC: LONDON OLYMPIC GAMES 313.8 PLAYSTATION VITA KINECT STAR WARS MARIO PARTY 9 SUPER MARIO 3D LAND MARIO KART 7 SKYLANDERS: SPYRO’S ADVENTURE MAX PAYNE 3 KID ICARUS: UPRISING Source: BARB July2012
Microsoft currently occupies the top spot, with Kinect’s campaign achieving a total of 367 TVRs. This equates to an overall 5.27 per cent share of the games and consoles TV ad market. But this has been over a period of 14 weeks on air, resulting in a low average weight of 26 TVRs per week. Conversely, Mario & Sonic’s campaign concentrated its airtime across just three weeks. This resulted in a weekly weight of almost four times as much as Kinect’s ads. Sony’s strategy for PS Vita was somewhere between the two. Advertising for a total of seven weeks, they recorded an average of 41 TVRs per week. Whilst share of voice in those weeks would have been lower than Sega’s, different length commercials would have ensured stand out. Nintendo has four campaigns in the Top Ten – more than any other advertiser. Year-to-date, there have been 17 Nintendo campaigns, twice as many as the next closest advertiser (Microsoft with eight).
Total UK Software Sales Source: UKIE/Chart-Track and Intent Media