UK boxed game sales spike over Easter

UK games retailers enjoyed its busiest weekend yet last week, thanks to BioShock and Tomb Raider.
The two blockbuster releases of the last month dominated the Chart-Track Top 40 last week, with BioShock Infinite becoming the fastest selling game in the series to date.

743,045 games were sold in the UK last week, generating £20.26m in revenue. A rise of 47 per cent week-on-week. This number is for boxed video games only, GfK Chart-Track currently does not track digital game sales.

It was also one of the busiest release weeks for some time, with Luigi’s Mansion 2 (No.5 in the charts), Army of Two: The Devil’s Cartel (No.6), Tiger Woods PGA Tour 14 (No.8), LEGO City Undercover (No.13) and Sly Cooper: Thieves in Time (No.31) joining BioShock: Infinite on the shelves.

It marked an end to a solid March for the trade, following a disappointing start to the year. However, with a lack of new software due over the next two months, game sales are expected to slip again before the end-of-year rush.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/uk-boxed-game-sales-spike-over-easter/0113674

REVISION: Spec broken down part 3

the issues raised by media ownership in contemporary media practice; Below: Revision prompts to do with the part of the spec listed above: Ownership in the games industry: aka AAA/Blockbuster games vs The Independent

Lesson 20 - Games Distribution

Task 1 - Distributors for our case study games?

Read the following MCV article on Distribution ie. How the game gets from the manufacturer to the consumer. Games distribution special

After reading this, research the following facts: (click to read beyond the cut)

Lesson 14 - The UK Games Market

1. Go to http://www.mcvuk.com/retail-biz and find out the top 20 games chart of the last week: BlogPost these and then follow up with a commentary on the chart. Describe what kind of games are popular. This should try and go into detail, so you are not merely saying what games are in there - I need you to start writing more analytical, like A-Level Media Studies students. Look out for trends - what qualities do the games have in common? Are there any anomalies - does anything stand out? Are there any developers or publishers that pop up more than once? Which platforms dominate? Did anything surprise you? This needs to be a thorough piece of writing, do not take shortcuts!

2. Read the articles that I've labelled with the UK Games Market (Added as a quick link on the top right) and make notes in a new BlogPost entitled "The UK Games Market".

3. We are going to have to return to Cross-Media Convergence: How a game can be aided by other media channels - TV, Film, Internet, Print

eg.The Internet
*FIFA 13 Ultimate Team players logging into the EA Sports Site's Ultimate Team website to bid on new players in eBay style auctions or share their teams to Facebook
*Skylanders players being able to showcase their characters and engage in Skylanders themed games online in Skylanders Universe
*Rockstar Games uses Rockstar Games Social Club as a hub for players of all R* games - announcements, reminders of multiplayer competitions etc.


TASK: Blogpost a detailed definition of cross-media convergence with clear examples, A reminder of how R* uses cross-media convergence:

Revealed: The REAL size of the UK games market

The High Street may be having a tough time, but the UK games market is still incredibly healthy, MCV research shows today.

Is the UK games market fighting fit or fighting fire?

Rationally, a decline in UK industry Christmas marketing spend makes sense at a time when there are fewer games coming out, and the ones remaining are getting most of the attention.

Latest trends in the game industry

A fairly recent practice, since the mid-1990s, of the video game industry is the rise of game players as developers of game content. The rise of video game players as fourth-party developers of game content allows for more open source models of game design, development and engineering. Game players create user modifications (mods), which in some cases become just as popular, maybe even more popular, as the original game created. An example of this is the game Counter-strike, which began as a mod of the video game Half-Life and eventually became a published game in its own right that was very successful

While this "community of modifiers" may only add up to approximately 1% of a particular game's user base, the number of those involved will grow as more games offer modifying opportunities (such as, by releasing source code) and as the international community of gamers rise. According to Ben Sawyer, as many as 600,000 established online game community developers will exist by 2012. This will effectively add a new component to the game industry value chain and if it continues to mature it will integrate itself into the overall industry.^[3]

The industry has seen a shift towards games with multiplayer. A larger percentage of games on all types of platforms include some type of competitive online multiplayer.