European Games Market: New Releases Lose Market Share

According to a media report, sales of video and computer games in Europe grew by 1 percent in 2024, with a continued shift toward digital sales. However, the bad news for the market is that new games are contributing less to overall sales.

These figures and more are reported by Video Games Chronicle (VGC), citing supposedly official data from GSD (Game Sales Data). GSA itself does not publish any data, and the European games association, Video Games Europe, which launched GSD 2017, has not yet released figures for the past year either.

While VGC does not provide value sales figures for the past year, it does include data on physical and digital unit sales as well as the share of new releases in the total market. According to this data, 131.6 million games were sold digitally across Europe in 2024, while 56.5 million were sold physically. This reflects a 15 percent increase in digital sales and a 22 percent decrease in physical sales.

Sales of new releases, according to VGC, fell by 21 percent. Their share of the total market dropped to 27 percent, compared to 34 percent in 2023. Based on the total number of games sold, this means just under 50 million units of new releases were sold in 2024, compared to an estimated 60 million units in 2023.

The report also indicates that hardware sales declined by 21 percent. The best-selling platform was the PS5, though its sales also fell by 20 percent. Sales of the Switch were down 15 percent, while the Xbox Series X/S saw a dramatic decline of 48 percent, VGC writes.

In the annual charts, EA Sports FC 25 ranked first, ahead of Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 and EA Sports FC 24. Sony's Helldivers 2 secured the sixth spot. Notably, Black Myth: Wukong was absent from VGC’s list, which is in line with other official GSD data. The Chinese hit was also missing from the German annual charts published by the game association using GSD data, as the title’s publisher, Game Science, did not report the game to GSD.