A major change is occurring in the UK video game industry. For the first time, digital sales will be charted weekly in the United Kingdom. Previously, sales charts were only for physical sales. The first-ever digital sales chart will begin sometime this week.
This move is certainly a long time coming, as digital sales have become increasingly prominent in the industry. We’ve seen gaming titans like Call of Duty see their physical sales hit all-time lows in 2018. Conversely, though, Black Ops 4 broke digital sales records for Activision. In fact, the UK is almost completely digital, with 80% of video game sales being digital. While tracking physical sales certainly can give an idea of what games are selling, it doesn’t tell the whole story. Now that we’ll know what games are taking off digitally, we’ll finally have the full picture.
However, while we’ll ultimately see digital and physical sales combined in one chart, for the time being they will be separate. There’s no timeframe on just when we’ll see the combined chart, but it’s set to happen later in 2019.
The combined physical/digital UK chart will take a little longer the appear. But the first UK digital chart will go live this week.
— Christopher Dring (@Chris_Dring) January 7, 2019
It’ll certainly be interesting to see how the addition of digital sales impact the overall charts. We’ll probably not see a huge change in the charts, but there could be some surprises along the way. For now, though, you can see which game made it to the top of this week’s physical sales chart, and we’ll see what differences the digital chart will have.
