European Gaming Market Sees Strong Sales from Xbox, Sony, Nintendo, and Star Wars

During April, a total of 10.4 million PC and console games were sold across Europe, marking a decline of 5.3% compared to the same period in 2022, based on data from GSD, which tracks physical game sales in major European markets and digital sales from key publishers. Full details can be found at the end of the article. The top-selling game in April was Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, which outsold FIFA 23 to claim the number one spot, despite only being available for a few days when the data was collected. This represents a strong launch for the new Star Wars game, with sales increasing by nearly 6% compared to its predecessor, Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order, released in November 2019. Notably, 55% of Survivor's sales were digital, whereas for Fallen Order, digital sales accounted for 35%, highlighting the acceleration of digital sales for single-player games across Europe during the pandemic. Another significant new release in April was Dead Island 2, which debuted at number three. Although it has been a long time since the original Dead Island, and thus comparative numbers are not available, the game appears to have performed well. Its sales were about a third lower than those of the Resident Evil 4 remake, released in March, and which is part of a more established series. Despite the success of these new releases, they were unable to match the performance of last year's major release, LEGO Star Wars: The Skywalker Saga. The next best-performing new release in April was Minecraft Legends, which reached number 19 in its debut month. In terms of hardware sales, console sales across selected markets rose by nearly 58% compared to April last year, with all three major platforms performing strongly. PS5 sales increased by 144% over April last year, making it the best-selling platform of the month, while Nintendo Switch sales rose by nearly 38%, and Xbox Series S and X sales were up by over 19%. However, compared to March, only Nintendo Switch sales increased month-on-month, partly due to the release of a special edition console at the end of the month, ahead of the new Zelda game, Tears of the Kingdom. Sales of accessories and other add-on products grew by 11% over April last year, with more than 1.2 million products sold, led by the PS5 DualSense controller, followed by the Xbox Series Wireless Controller. Finally, in terms of points cards, sales increased by 10% over April 2022 to 1.14 million units, with PlayStation Store, Roblox, and Steam Wallet cards being the top performers. Digital data includes games from participating companies sold via Steam, Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, and Nintendo Eshop, including major companies like Activision Blizzard, Bandai Namco, and Electronic Arts, although Nintendo and 505 Games are notable exceptions. The digital data covers games sold in multiple European countries, while physical data includes all games sold in specific major markets, and console hardware sales cover various key European markets.