After two consecutive years at its highest, the French video game market experienced a slight drop of 1.6% in 2022, affected by the inflationary context and the difficulties in supplying consoles, according to a report published on Wednesday.
“In a difficult economic, energy and geopolitical context, our market is demonstrating a strong capacity for resilience”, underlines Julie Chalmette, president of the Syndicate of leisure software publishers (Sell), author of the study with four partners (GSD, GameTrack, IDC and data.ai).
Because beyond the economic analysis, “the growth of the market was between 2019 and 2022, of more than 12%”, she recalls, with a turnover increasing from 4.98 to 5.53 Billions of Euro’s.
Console sales down 19%
The “hardware” segment, however, fell by 10% over one year with a turnover of 1.555 billion euros, due to shortages in the supply of semiconductors, which did not allow manufacturers to new consoles PlayStation 5 (Sony) and Xbox Series (Microsoft) to meet strong demand from gamers.
Consequence: console sales recorded their worst performance since 2019, with a 19% drop in turnover, to 646 million euros. But these difficulties do not “reflect consumer demand,” the authors point out.
Given the rich programming of “blockbuster” games in 2023, such as Hogwarts Legacy from the Harry Potter saga, which sold 12 million copies worldwide and generated $850 million two weeks after its launch in early February, and the next Zelda programmed in May, “there are very big titles which will most likely push the hardware market”, hopes Julie Chalmette.
“Fifa” undisputed leader
The French video game market still has other sources of growth with sales of games (“software”), on consoles and PCs, which “partly offset” the decline in “hardware”, with growth of 6% to 2 .1 billion euros.
The market share of complete physical games (18%) is ahead of that of complete dematerialized games (17%), while additional content represents 51% of “software” turnover.
As for the most popular games in 2022, it’s once again the annual edition of the football simulation Fifa which dominated the rankings, with 1.755 million copies sold, all platforms combined (physical and dematerialized market, excluding Nintendo’s dematerialized sales data). FIFA 23 even experienced in France, during its first week of sales, “the best start in Europe over the last five years”, according to the authors of the study.
10 Nintendo games in the top 20
Nintendo’s Switch console placed ten titles in the Top 20, thanks to games from the Pokémon franchise (Pokemon Legend: Arceus, Pokemon Purple, Pokemon Scarlet) which exceed by three the 1.3 million copies in total, and other older ones such as Mario Kart 8 Deluxefourth in the ranking (451,254 sales) and still popular despite its release in 2017.
Stable over one year, the mobile game market reached 1.415 billion euros. It is overtaken by the PC ecosystem, which generated 1.548 billion euros (+5.8%) over the year. In the mobile segment, almost all revenues come from micro-spending within games accessible for free.