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The worldwide digital games market grew nine per cent year-on-year in April to reach a total of $7.7bn, according to SuperData’s latest monthly report.
The mobile market also grew 8 per cent year-on-year last month, with free-to-play increasing by 27 per cent, but overall this was offset by falling sales in the social, premium PC, console and pay-to-play sectors, says SuperData.
Indeed, in the US, digital sales were down from March 2017, thanks no doubt in part to the sharp decline in digital revenue from both EA’s Mass Effect Andromeda and Ubisoft’s Ghost Recon Wildlands. SuperData posits this might have been a result of each game’s middling reviews from the press, but there was better news to be found in the free-to-play MMO, console and mobile markets, as these all experienced high single-digit revenue growth, according to SuperData, that counterbalanced the slight decline in social and premium PC revenue.
Playerunknown’s Battlegrounds in particular made a huge splash last month, generating an estimated $34m in gross digital revenue despite still being an Early Access title. This was enough to put it right at the top of April’s premium PC digital revenue chart, and it also charted in seventh place in the worldwide Top Ten PC games list for the month as well.
Mass Effect Andromeda may have fallen out of favour, but EA continued to dominate the console chart, with FIFA 17 claiming the No.1 spot and Battlefield 1 the No.2 spot. FIFA 17’s digital revenue jumped double-digits year-on-year, a large portion of which came from Ultimate Team. Battlefield 1, meanwhile, was slightly down on its performance in March 2017, says SuperData, but its recent ‘They Shall Not Pass’ DLC helped it regain some ground.
Grand Theft Auto V also experienced a year-on-year uptick thanks to its recent ‘Tiny Racers’ update, which saw an increase in microtransactions in GTA Online.
Here’s the full global Top Ten console chart, as ranked by April 2017 earnings:
1. FIFA 17
2. Battlefield 1
3. Grand Theft Auto V
4. Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare
5. Tom Clancy’s Ghost Recon: Wildlands
6. Call of Duty: Black Ops III
7. Overwatch
8. Persona 5
9. Destiny
10. NBA 2K17
