CANBERRA: Ron Curry, IGEA CEO has said that Australian video games revenue is up over 20% year-on-year to $2.46-billion. The figure comes from market data research by NPD Group and Telsyte, with the two firms responsible for tracking physical and digital sales respectively.
Boxed unit sales were up 7% on 2013, emassing $1.214-billion, with digital sales jumping 39% to $1.248-billion. Much of the growth at retail was off the back of strong hardware sales, in particular, PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Wii U. Hardware sales grew by a massive 47% year-on-year. Ron Curry, IGEA CEO, said, “The Australian video games industry is in great shape, led by next gen launches and growth in digital, according to our latest research. Platform holders, publishers and developers continue to see strong demand for their products and are positioning the industry for further growth into the future.”
“In 2014, a number of factors improved the mobile gaming experience, including larger screen smartphones, faster graphics processing and wider availability of premium games and titles. Clearly tablet and smartphone gaming has gone beyond being just a casual gaming platform”. IGEA has provided a review of the state of the video games industry in Australia using commissioned research from NPD Group Australia since 2009. The combined NPD and Telsyte data provide a more complete picture of the industry.
IGEA will also be releasing the Digital Australia 2016 (DA16) report later in the year, which looks at key data on the ifestyles, habits, attitudes and demographics of Australians who play computer and video games whilst looking the consumption of interactive games in conjunction with other digital technologies. IGEA will be releasing a New Zealand Industry report in the coming weeks. You can view the Top 10 selling titles for 2014 here, as well as our breakdown of the IGEA Top Ten Charts for all of 2014 here. The below infographic is a snapshot of the 2014 report.