MCV/DEVELOP News, events, research and jobs from the games industry
With two weeks of chart data coming in today, we can announce that Call of Duty ticked off weeks eight and nine at No.1 as well. That now puts its level-pegging with Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 in terms of consecutive weeks at the top. Congratulations to Activision UK on that achievement. Though it needs another couple of weeks to equal Black Ops 3’s 11 weeks in total (non-consecutive) at No.1.
With the shift to digital it’s predictable that the current title isn’t doing the same numbers as its illustrious predecessors, though that won’t bother Activision, who will be picking up those sales online. Something we should be able to track more precisely in the near future thanks to the upcoming combined sales chart.
There’s been little other change at the top with Call of Duty followed by FIFA, Battlefront 2, Assassin’s Creed Origins and Grand Theft Auto in the current top 5. Unsurprising given a total lack of new releases in the Top 40. Predictably, all those titles showed strong week-on-week growth figures up to the 23rd of December and then around 40% drop offs in the week running up to the new year.
2017 END OF YEAR
While we await the official figures for 2017’s physical games sales, there’s nothing in the last week’s chart that changes our own recent ‘back of an excel sheet’ totting up of the biggest selling titles in the UK 2017 – where FIFA 18 retains the top spot.
One thing we can say is that with Week 52’s data in, we can see that physical sales on PS4 were up by 6.6 per cent over the year, while Xbox One’s physical sales slumped by 11.1 per cent over the same period – largely due to a very slim lineup of big exclusives on the console.
The market as a whole moved up by 2.1 per cent, though that’s within the rate of inflation for consumer prices, so it effectively stayed flat. Though given a prevailing narrative of digital shift that’s a remarkable result for the sales of boxed games.
