Spider-Man and Super Mario win in October as console sales fall | UK Monthly Charts

gamesindustry.biz:

Due to a technical situation at the charts company, we are using GfK data for physical game sales this month.

1.6 million digital games were sold in the UK during October (GSD data), a drop of 24% over the year before.

Meanwhile, GfK data shows that physical game sales are up slighty (+8%) to 1.08 million games sold.

The main reason for the overall drop is the fact that Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 launched in October last year, whereas this year's Call of Duty landed in November.

There was also a drop in sales for this year's football game. EA Sports FC 24's first week sales, looking at GfK and GSD numbers together, are 16% lower than last year's FIFA 23. 2022's FIFA game was the last one by EA, and also tied into the World Cup that took place in December, which led to a strong opening month for the game.

The best-selling new game of the month was Spider-Man 2 from Sony. By combining GfK and GSD sales together, we can see that the first two weeks are nearly 9% lower than 2018's original Spider-Man, but 94% bigger than 2020's Spider-Man: Miles Morales.

Compared with last year's big PlayStation game, God of War Ragnarok, the first two weeks of sales are 2% higher for Spider-Man 2. Note: God of War Ragnarok was available on PS4 and PS5, whereas Spider-Man 2 is purely a PS5 game.

Next on the new game list is Assassin's Creed Mirage, which was the third biggest digital game of the month and the fourth biggest physical release. The game's sales are 58% lower than the opening four weeks for Assassin's Creed Valhalla, which released in 2020. However, this was always billed as a smaller Assassin's Creed, with gameplay similar to older titles in the series. The first four weeks of sales for Mirage are almost identical to