Retailers hail £113m Black Ops boom week

The Black Ops boom has put UK games retail back on track after months of facing year-on-year market decline.

The FPS made over 80m in the UK last week, and sold over 2m units in five days – helping the High Street towards its biggest week for games ever: 113m was made, and 3.3m games were sold.

Microsoft’s Kinect also landed last week, and has already sold 1m units globally.

Retail is elated at the effect on the market.
Tesco’s senior games buying manager John Stanhope told MCV that last week was the supermarket’s best ever single week of sales, and Black Ops became its best-selling line in one day.

Asda’s games chief Andrew Thompson added: It has been a fantastic week for the games industry with two blockbuster launches.

We have had hundreds of thousands of customers queuing into the night at Asda stores to get their hands on Black Ops and Kinect. I am very happy with how we have performed on both launches last week.”

Now retailers are optimistic games are back at the forefront of shoppers’ minds – and that they can stave off the market slump. Prior to Black Ops, the software market was down year-on-year by 22 per cent in value terms. Now that gap has closed to just five per cent.

HMV’s head of games Tim Ellis said: It should really help build momentum now that we’re running up to Christmas.

Both products have helped drive online and store traffic to create a sense of in-store theatre, which, in turn, has led to extensive media coverage and the ‘halo’ effect. We need to keep this going to ensure that games are the ‘must-have’ gifts this Christmas.”