UK consumer games market hits record value of £7bn in 2020

• The launches of the Xbox Series S/X and PlayStation 5 in November played an important role in pushing console hardware revenues up 74.8% year on year, according to data supplied by GfK Entertainment. But the Nintendo Switch generated the largest share of console hardware revenue, with the launch of Animal Crossing: New Horizons in March 2020 at the onset of lockdown a major driver.

• PC games hardware growth was driven in large parts by the shift to home working, with consumers purchasing dedicated games computers to ensure home working set ups could double as entertainment systems.

• VR hardware sales grew by nearly a third to £129m, with the arrival of accessible, standalone headsets such as the Oculus Quest 2 driving the market forward.

• The February release of the hugely successful Sonic The Hedgehog movie, 2020’s only game-related film helped the movies and soundtracks category stave off the worst of the pandemic to manage an overall decline of just 22.2%.

• For the first time, the 2020 valuation includes a measurement of streaming and game video content revenues, with UK consumers spending £45.6m through donations and subscriptions, making up for a notable decline in physical event revenues.

“The latest consumer market valuation confirms just how valuable games proved to people across the country during one of the toughest years of our lives,” said Dr Jo Twist OBE, CEO of Ukie.

“The games sector is a growing, resilient and critical part of the UK’s successful creative industries sector. We all know how important entertainment, technology and creativity have been over the last year. The London Games Festival over the next 10 days will showcase and connect the fantastic leading games businesses right here in the UK with global audiences, investors and publishers, and will demonstrate games’ power to connect, entertain and innovate.”

“The ways in which PC and console gaming evolved across the past decade have made them adaptable to the exceptional conditions of the past year,” said Steven Bailey, Principal Analyst at Omdia. “Experiences driven so heavily by connectivity allowed us to remain social, as we dealt with the difficulties of lockdown, while the versatile nature of digital consumption gave us a number of ways to keep buying and playing games.”

“The 2020 big winner by format was Nintendo Switch for software by revenue,” said Dorian Bloch, Senior Client Director for Market Intelligence at GfK Entertainment. “During the initial Covid lockdown period, covering weeks 13-25 in 2020 where many stores were closed and the initial Covid spike affected many entertainment sectors, we saw massive growth from Switch software sales, up 215% over the equivalent 13 weeks of 2019.”

The UK games industry provided extensive support to communities affected by the COVID-19 crisis. It shared ‘Stay Home, Save lives’ messages in games, provided nearly 100,000 free games to NHS workers through its Games for Carers initiative and supported DCMS’s #LetsTalkLoneliness campaign with a dedicated Play&Talk weekend in June 2020.

The valuation was announced at the start of this year’s London Games Festival, run in partnership with Film London and Ukie. It runs from 19 March to 28 March entirely online, with a wide programme of online cultural and business events and broadcasts that are free to view and includes the Festival’s first ever Official Selection of 40 games to discover and play.

The UK consumer market valuation was compiled by Ukie with the support of ABC, BFI, GfK Entertainment, Kantar Worldpanel, Nielsen Bookscan, NPD, the Official Charts Company and Omdia.

You can read more about the consumer valuation at https://ukie.org.uk/news/uk-games-industry-valuation-2020.

More information about the London Games Festival can be found at www.games.london