According to the Digital Entertainment and Retail Association’s annual report for 2022, video games remained the biggest home entertainment sector with an estimated £11.1 billion earned in revenue in the UK as a result of music, video and game sales.
With video revenues increasing by 13.3% (as a result of streaming sites) and physical music sales growing for the first time in twenty years, the games market has doubled in the space of a decade. The CEO of the ERA , Kim Bayley, says, “The entire sector was braced for revenues to settle down in 2021 after 2020 grew an astonishing 18.7%, but growth continued – for the ninth successive year.” They believe this success is owed to “digital services making entertainment more accessible.”
Although games have been a dominant player in the entertainment industry for a decade, 2021 saw a decrease which was attributed to the Covid-19 epidemic as well as the worldwide shortage for Playstation 5s. However, sales increased again in 2022 with its best selling game Fifa 22 selling a whopping 917,000 physical copies and 1.3 million digital copies. Bayley went onto say, “The UK games market is more than double the size it was 10 years ago… Despite the slight reverse in 2021, we can be confident that the games business will continue to prosper.”
Bayley ends by summarising the video game industry “remains the often-unheralded leader of the entertainment market”, so there is every possibility that the sector will continue to grow in 2023 and onwards.
