The Australian video game market for 2019 fell by 10% year-on-year. The decline in indicators affected almost all sectors of the gaming economy, except subscriptions. On the contrary, it jumped by 28%.
This was recently reported by IGEA (Association of Interactive Games and Entertainment of Australia and New Zealand). She also noted that until 2019, there had been no falls in the sector since 2012.
Let’s focus on the key metrics for the past year:
- total revenue was $2.8 billion (21% drop);
- traditional retail game sales totaled $639 million (21% drop);
- digital game sales totaled $1.7 billion (down 6%);
- mobile game sales totaled $690 million (a 10% drop).
The unfavorable situation is explained by an extremely strong 2018. First of all, we are talking about the unprecedented demand for Fortnite. In 2019, there were no comparable releases in terms of commercial success.
The association also talks about the global trend to reduce indicators before the launch of a new generation of consoles and, accordingly, new large-scale projects. It is only unclear why such a situation should have affected, among other things, the mobile games market, which also lost 10% in revenue in Australia last year.
The reasons for the growth of the subscription market, which jumped by 28%, are not mentioned in the report. Although they note that they expect its further growth in 2020 against the background of the emergence of new devices and projects.
Just below we present the original infographic with numbers. Please note that the revenue in it is indicated in Australian dollars (in the text just above, we converted them to American dollars).
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