Everyone was doing it last year (Photo by Philip Sowels/Future via Getty Images)
Gaming continues to be the most lucrative form of home entertainment in the UK, with total revenues rising last year to £4,660,000,000.
You’d hardly guess, given the way mainstream media still treats video games, but they’ve long been the biggest home entertainment business in the UK.
Early figures from the annual report of the Digital Entertainment and Retail Association (ERA) reveals that games accounted for 42.1% of all home entertainment spends in 2022, up 2.3% on 2021.
However, that’s with the obvious caveat that this is all based on revenues and games are considerably more expensive than other forms of entertainment, so it doesn’t mean that more people overall were playing games than listening to music or watching TV.
Of those sales almost 90% were digital, although that does include mobile gaming. Also, some publishers, most obviously Nintendo, don’t reveal their digital sales.
According to the ERA less than 30% of game sales were from mobile, which seems surprisingly low but perhaps there’ll be more details in the full report in March.
Mobile sales saw a modest rise of 3.2% in 2022, to a total of £1.48 billion, while console downloads increased by 12.2% to £724 million.
Previous figures suggested that overall video game sales fell by 6% in 2021, with console hardware sales down by as much as 29%.
‘Gaming remains the often-unheralded leader of the entertainment market,’ ERA CEO Kim Bayley told GamesIndustry.biz.
‘While growth at 2.3% was lower than that of video or music, its scale is enormous and in terms of innovation and excitement it continues to set the pace for the entire entertainment sector.’
As she implies, video was the fastest growing segment of the home entertainment market last year, as subscription giants such as Netflix and Amazon Prime continue to fight for dominance.
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Gaming continues to be the most lucrative form of home entertainment in the UK, with total revenues rising last year to £4,660,000,000.
