European trade association says consoles are top platform by revenue in €21.6bn EU market

The ISFE has released its annual ‘Key Facts’ before this year’s Gamescom and it shows that games consoles currently pull in more revenue than mobile or PC games. 

The figures, drawn for the period up to the beginning on the pandemic lockdown showed console revenues taking 43 per cent of the market, followed closely by mobile and tablet revenues at 40 per cent, with PC trailing back at 16 per cent. While any such figures must be taken with a pinch of salt, it’s clear that dedicated games consoles have had a fantastically successful current-gen period. 

More broadly, and this is for the year ending pre-lockdown remember, European revenue grew 3% over the year and now totals €21.6bn in the EU. With Gametrack showing that the key European markets for games had grown by 55 per cent since 2014. Of course that figure is about to get knocked down, on paper at least, by a few billion as the UK leaves the EU, it will be intriguing to see how such reports handle reporting across the region post-Brexit. 

Digital revenues have grown to 76 per cent of the total gaming spend, up by 2 per cent year on year – and with mobile revenues being all digital already that roughly fits with the long-predicted 5 per cent shift per annum for console titles. 

Although, as with many things, we expect the pandemic to have hugely accelerated that change during 2020, and for the digital-only versions of next-gen consoles to push that number higher still over the next two to three years. 

In terms of demographics, more than half of Europeans aged 6-64 play video games, with the average age of such players in the EU being 31 years old. The report also states that 45% of EU video gamers are women.

Games still trail behind more passive forms of activity, with gaming taking up 8.6 hours per week , compared to social media at 14 hours and TV/VOD at 25 hours.

You can read the full the report here. 

ISFE’s Chairman, Olaf Coenen, said: “This will be a year none of us will forget and our 2020 report will no doubt tell an unusual story. 2019 saw our sector continue to play a considerable part in Europe’s digital success, largely due to its creative talent and capacity for innovation with digital sales representing 76 % of the revenue in key European markets. The 2019 data also illustrates the diversity of our audience with women representing 45% of Europe’s video game players.”