It was another very quiet month for UK games sales last month, according to the latest digital and physical market data from GSD.
Grand Theft Auto 5 was the best-selling game of the month, and the Rockstar game has sold more in its first two months this year than it did during the same period in 2019.
Overall, 1.7 million games were sold last month, which is a drop of 15.4% year-on-year. Last year's February was significantly busier, with the likes of Anthem, Kingdom Hearts III, Resident Evil 2 and Far Cry New Dawn doing the bulk of the business. This year's only new release in the charts is PS4 exclusive Dreams, which reached No.6.
Just short of 900,000 games were sold digitally, with the rest coming physical. The physical data includes every game sold in a box, whereas the digital data only includes games from 15 major publishers (you can see the full list below). If we just analyse the data with those 15 publishers (physical and digital) we can see that 65.5% of game sales came via Steam, PSN, Xbox Live and Nintendo eShop.
A big digital seller in February was Ubisoft's The Division 2. The game was boosted by price activity and extra promotion ahead of the launch of a new expansion pack, which is billed as a significant new push for the 2019 title.
Most games were sold on PS4 last month, with the console enjoying a 40.8% market share. This was followed by Xbox One with a 25.7% share. Note: Nintendo does not share sales of first-party digital games.
As a result of The Division 2 and strong sales of Rainbow Six Siege, Ubisoft was the top publisher of the month with a 17.5% share of all game sales. If we just count physical sales, Nintendo is No.1 with a 19.6% share (again, digital sales of Nintendo games are not included)
Over in console hardware, and sales have taken a far steeper drop of 37% in February compared with the same period the year before. Just over 71,000 games machines were sold in the UK during the month.
Nintendo Switch was comfortably the best-selling console, although sales are flat year-on-year. The Neon version of the console was the single best-selling version.
PS4 and Xbox One console sales suffered the biggest drops ahead of the launch of PS5 and Xbox Series X this year.

https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articl...ck-in-february