Black Friday video game sales dip in the UK | UK Monthly Charts
Just over three million video games were sold in the UK during November, which is a drop of 33% over the year before (GSD data).
It seems like a big fall, but there are two pretty significant caveats. First, Call of Duty launched in November last year, whereas it released in October this year, which means we don't have a major game release this time around. Second, Black Friday doesn't sit within this year's November data period, whereas it did last year. As a result, December's figures are likely to be significantly higher.
Black Friday data is available, however. And we can see that 1.53 million games were sold during Black Friday week, which is a fall of over 8% compared with Black Friday 2023.
Unfortunately, the absence of Black Friday does skew all the statistics somewhat. Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 is No.1 once again, followed by EA Sports FC 25. EA's football game's sales are 22% lower in November this year compared to last year. Black Friday data is missing, but if we skip ahead and look purely at that sales week, EA Sports FC's Black Friday performance in 2024 is 20% behind that it did in 2023.
The highest charting new release of the month is Dragon Age: The Veilguard at No.3. EA's title has had a slow start to life. After four weeks on sale, it is the 12th fastest-selling game of the year, ahead of Final Fantasy VII: Rebirth (+1.5%), but behind the likes of Astro Bot (-9.6%), Star Wars Outlaws (-15%), Dragon's Dogma 2 (-21%) and Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero (-28%).
Another new release is Mario & Luigi: Brothership, which just misses out on the Top Ten at No.11. After three weeks on sale, it is the slowest selling of the Mario RPGs released these past 12 months, with sales 16% lower than Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (released in May) and 19% behind Super Mario RPG (released in November last year). Both of thosegames are remakes of previously popular releases.
It's worth noting we are only comparing physical sales here with the Mario titles, as Nintendo does
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