COMPUTER AND VIDEO GAMES SALES ROCKETED

New figures released today by The European Leisure Software Publishers Association (ELSPA) show that UK sales of video games and other leisure software products and games consoles reached an all time high in year 2001 with sales values reaching just over £1.6 billion, a massive 36% increase on the previous year. 51.2 million units of games hardware and software were sold during the twelve months, 21% up on the previous year. And the upward trend is set to continue this year with launches of two new consoles, the Game Cube from Nintendo and the Xbox from Microsoft.

Top Sellers
During 2001, nine top selling games achieved ELSPA’s highest level Platinum Volume Sales Award for sales over 300,000 units, they were: WWF Smackdown published by THQ; Who Wants to be a Millionaire by Eidos; The Sims by EA Games; Driver 2 by Infogrames; Tomb Raider 4 by Eidos; Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2 by Activision; Grand Theft Auto 3 by Take 2; Gran Turismo 3 by Sony Computer Entertainment Europe and, of course, Harry Potter - The Philosopher’s Stone by EA, which went Platinum in just five weeks, the fastest seller of the year.

New Consoles Boost the Market
The biggest growth area last year was in sales of console hardware and software boosted by the launches of the new PS2 and Gameboy Advance consoles. The total value of console hardware sales increased by an incredible 121% on the previous year, reaching an all time high of £567 million on the back of 4 million consoles sold during the year. The boom in consoles inevitably fed through to software sales with a record 30.5 million units of console software sold (up 26% on last year) worth £711 million.

The market for home computer software also fared better than the previous year with the volume of units sold up by 10% to 16.7 million whilst the value of sales remained static at £346 million.