UK video games consumer market valued at £7.82bn in 2023

Last week, Ukie (the UK's video games and interactive entertainment trade body) published its Consumer Market Valuation Report, valuing the UK video games market at a whopping £7.82bn - a 4.4% increase from its 2022 valuation.

The main highlights are:

• A general increase in consumer purchasing of games software, but with an increasing focus on digital purchases (up 5.6%) and a decrease in the purchase of boxed software (down 5%).
• Both digital PC software sales and mobile game sales increased, each by 4.5%.
• In terms of hardware, console sales were up by 12% to £951m, with a perhaps surprising fall in PC gaming hardware sales by 11% (although it is not clear from the report how the line was drawn between PC gaming hardware and other non-gaming PC hardware).
• Interestingly, and pleasingly for those investing in the metaverse as future of interactive entertainment, VR hardware sales rose by a huge 11%. However, they do still remain the lowest in sales of all forms of video games hardware at £194m total.
• Ukie accounted for digital content and TV within its valuation of all video game franchised content for the first time, which resulted in total sales of £418m, also including toys, merchandise, books, films and more. Film and TV content based on video game IPs have not always performed well, but that appears to be changing with huge recent successes in the likes of Super Mario, The Last of Us and more recently, Fallout, to name just a few.
• Excitingly for the UK market, events and venues had a 140% surge to £10.3m, which Ukie notes was driven by events such as Pokémon GO Fest and Apex Legends Global Series (a global esports tournament for Respawn's hit battle royale).