GTA 5 tops UK physical and download charts for February 2020

The latest GSD report for monthly physical and digital sales in the UK has shown just how quiet February 2020 was on the release front.

The best-selling game for the whole month was Grand Theft Auto 5, a game that will be seven years old in September. The game has sold better in the first two months of 2020 than it did for the same period in 2019, when games such as Resident Evil 2 Remake and Kingdom Hearts 3 were topping the charts.

A total of 1.7 million games were sold in February 2020, a drop of 15.4 percent year-on-year. As we’ve already pointed out, the same period in 2019 was packed with new games, including Anthem and Far Cry: New Dawn. The only new release to make it into the charts this year is Dreams, a PlayStation 4 exclusive, in sixth place.

Just under 900,000 digital sales were made for the month, with the rest being physical retail sales. Physical sales encompass all boxed game sales, but digital sales only include games sold from fifteen major publishers (full list at the bottom of this article). The data shows that 65.5 percent of all digital sales were made through Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, Nintendo eShop, or Steam.

The Division 2 from Ubisoft was the biggest seller for February 2020. A new expansion, Warlords of New York, was announced, which helped to boost sales. In many storefronts the game was also discounted to around £5 to encourage new players to try it out ahead of this expansion’s release.

The majority of games sold over the past month were for PlayStation 4, which held 40.8 percent of the market. The Xbox One was the next largest with 25.7 percent of the market, and Nintendo came in third. However, Nintnedo doesn’t share sales data for their first-party games, so they may have placed higher in reality.

Ubisoft was the top publisher for the month, thanks to both the success of The Division 2, and strong sales of Rainbow Six Siege. The latter had a new expansion announced as well, Operation Void Edge, helping the publisher soak up 17.5 percent of all game sales for the month.

Based purely on physical sales data, Nintendo would come out on top with 19.6 percent of all sales. With digital sales included the company would definitely dominate the publisher chart.

Console hardware continues to see an overall decline in sales, with a drop of 37 percent year-on-year. In the UK in February 2020 71,000 games machines were sold. The Nintendo Switch is still the best-selling console, but sales are flat year-on-year, with theNeon model selling best.

926,000 game accessories, toys-to-life, and points cards were sold over the month. These generated £24.3 million, which is a 20 percent drop year-on-year in units, and a 14 percent drop year-on-year in terms of revenue.

The best-selling points card was the £10 Xbox Live gift card. In accessories, the Camo Green DualShock 4 controller was the best-seller, and Dark Samus was the best-selling toys-to-life product for the second month in a row.

The GSD charts for the four weeks ending on the 22nd of February 2020 are as follows.