The First Digital Games UK Chart Is Finally Here, and It's Very Different

This changes things immensely.

GTAV was never good.

It'd be good to have a digital chart without PC sales and then a combined digital/physical chart or just some sale numbers so we can work it out. I'll be interested to see where or if Blood and Truth fits in when we get that weeks sales as I'd imagine more people would buy VR games digitally to make it simpler to switch games

Monopoly Plus? Uno? I didn’t realize the senior citizens were downloading so many games.

Huh, neat. And weird I guess..

Rockstar killing it in both charts.

Hey, can’t go wrong with UNO. I used to play this a lot back on 360. And not surprised about GTAV at all.

A bit pointless if not all the publishers are releasing sales figures.

@Flaming_Kaiser Your favourite games are here too - GTAV & RDR2 😂

Is this a joke?

Uno

Possibly the worst card game after Snap or Pairs. Absolute disgrace. Someone needs to make a digital version of snakes and ladders and the crowd will go wild!

@TheArt Still hate it.

@ShogunRok what % of overall sales in UK are digital? Or is that an unknown still. If its a healthy chunk your sentiment is more than right

Am I missing something or we can't compare this list with the physical one as there are no actual sales figures just a ranking?

@Nyne11Tyme I think there were reports not too long ago that said most retail games are around a 50/50 split, maybe even leaning a little more into digital.

more like steam sales chart

I wish we had digital, physical and combined charts. to have a better idea. Also, how can Cities:Skylines go from 94th to 6th place???

@roe Not exactly. 100% of PC game sales are digital, whereas physical sales still make up the vast majority of console sales. As of a year and a half ago, 75% of FIFA's sales were physical. Some games are 50/50 but they're usually ultra AAA titles. I also wonder if PS+ game downloads are included as digital sales, as Sony does apparently pay the dev an amount for the downloads, treating it as a sale.

There are also games that are physical only. The fact that Uno and Monopoly feature in the chart show the kind of low sales numbers we're talking about. You can look on Steam Charts to see the specific number of players playing a game (over the past week, for example) and it's usually surprisingly low. The worldwide number of players of TW: Three Kingdoms is 102,000 only. That's worldwide, imagine how small it'd be in the UK specifically, yet its #1 in the above chart.
https://steamcharts.com/search/?q=Three+kingdoms

I say this as a PC gamer, too. For the last few weeks all I've done is play on my PC.

@Dellybelly As I said in my post, the game that's currently #1 in digital sales hasn't sold that much as only 102,000 people in the world, not the UK, have played it in the last month. And that's the best selling one.

Digital will probably take over one day, but you only have to look at how bad the reaction would be if the PS5 had no disc drive to see how it's not accepted yet.

@Dellybelly Yeah but there are typically about 15,000,000 people on Steam at once, at peak times, so 102,000 players playing a game is still low. It's less than 1% of people on Steam. Let's say a million people bought the game - that's not a great amount - it'd still mean 90% of them aren't playing it concurrently which seems odd. How low must the sales be, bearing in mind they'll be heavily focussed in the West where most of us aren't too far apart in timezones and that this is a game you play for hours at a time, where the peak concurrent was 102,000? Then shrink it further to represent just the UK.

I dunno why you're so in favour of digital anyway, the prices are way higher and you don't even own the game. I agree an all digital future will happen, but it's odd to be in a rush to get there if you're a consumer rather than a shareholder.