FIFA 19 fails to impress at retail, sales down significantly year-on-year

FIFA 19 hit shelves last Friday and took the top spot of the charts this week, as expected. However, sales for EA’s football behemoth have fallen by a relatively incredible amount for such a strong franchise: sales were down 25 per cent year-on-year.

Back in January EA predicted an annual five per cent digital shift for full games but, even taking this into account, the drop remains quite impressive. Either the shift to digital was more important than predicted, or FIFA didn’t manage to convince players this year.

What’s for sure is that FIFA 19’s Switch version didn’t attract players once again this year, as only one per cent of the sales went to Nintendo’s platform, much like last year. Meanwhile, 64 per cent of the sales went to PS4 and 35 per cent to Xbox One.

FIFA 19 didn’t have a lot of strong competitors last week though, with the only new entry in the Top Ten being Sega’s Valkyria Chronicles 4, which debuted at No.9.

Spider-Man and Shadow of the Tomb Raider both still had very strong sales. Spider-Man’s sales only dropped 23 per cent as Sony’s title held on to No.2, while Square Enix’s Tomb Raider had a 30 per cent decrease week-on-week, making it to No.3.

There are no other new entries in the charts this week, but a couple of strong re-entries, with bundles boosting sales for Tekken 7 (up 638 per cent) which landed at No.19 and Project CARS (up 966 per cent), which made it to No.20.

Here’s the Top Ten for the week ending September 29th (data courtesy of GfK/Ukie):