UK videogame sales on the up

Britons are buying loads of videogames in the run-up to Christmas, according to shopwatchers Chart-Track. In fact, last week was the eighth-biggest sales week ever in the UK.

"Everyone's been gearing up for week 46, and we've put 101 different SKUs on our system for the week," said Chart-Track's Dorian Bloch, speaking to our sexy friends at GamesIndustry.biz.

"It's not the biggest sales week - we haven't gotten to Christmas yet - but it was a big week."

Wasn't it just, with titles such as Call of Duty: World at War and World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King hitting the shelves for the first time. COD topped the chart overall, with 55 per cent of copies sold being for Xbox 360. The PS3 version accounted for 31 per cent, while the PC version only managed 14 per cent.

It was a good week for PC gaming generally though, said Bloch; two of the top four games in the all-formats chart were PC exclusives. And that's not all.

"In terms of PC sales, if you look at the top five PC games, it's quite an impressive number - they accounted for 76 per cent of all PC games sold, which just goes to show how skewed it is towards big hitters," Bloch continued, while pointing a stick at a complex series of diagrams on a blackboard.

"That's very, very high - positions one, two and three were all new releases, Lich King, Football Manager, Call of Duty. The number one was a record-breaker, number two was a huge seller, and number three was a pretty good seller."

Using his amazing powers of clairvoyancy, Bloch predicted that sales of videogames will increase as Christmas draws nearer - but said there could be a blip on the horizon.

"The only proviso is that because we've had such an oddity with this week having so many huge releases, it's possible the market might dip slightly next week - simply because everyone's gone out and bought maybe one or two games, they've spent GBP 80, GBP 100 and that's quite a lot of money to spend week in, week out."