As people across the globe are stuck indoors due to the coronavirus, the interest around video games has seen a huge spike. So, it's not really surprising why this has translated to video game consoles as well. In Europe, consoles from Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo are getting more popular than ever.
Following severe declines for two months, the market in Europe appears to have bounced back in the past few weeks. A new report claims that console sales for the week March 16 - 22 increased by a whopping 155%, with all three popular systems -- Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, and Xbox One -- experiencing a huge boost.
In the UK, where social distancing is strictly observed. Console sales for Week 11 rose to 126% and even went higher in Week 12 at 250%. In France's first week of lockdown period, console sales increased by 140% week-on-week. The week before that, there was an increase of 17%.
In Italy, meanwhile, game machine sales rose to 84% in the first week of lockdown. However, it dipped on slightly by almost 2% in the second week. In Spain's first week of lockdown, sales increased by 30% and even increased by the second week at 66.1%.
The huge spike in console sales over the last two weeks is enough for the market to make a full recovery, the website for Games Industry reported. The improved sales simply mean that more people now own video game consoles as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic.
People are also downloading digital games more than ever. The same report indicated that 2.74 million games from participating publishers were downloaded from March 16 - 22. The data comes from 50 markets, which accumulated a jump of nearly 53% over the previous week.
It's worth noting that the week's biggest releases, Doom: Eternal and Animal Crossing: New Horizons were not included due to the fact that both Bethesda and Nintendo do not share their download data.
The console sales surge comes several months before the highly anticipated release of the next generation of consoles, the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X. Both systems will ship in holiday 2020.
Despite the ongoing health crisis, Sony hasn't announced changes to its original date of launch. Similarly, Microsoft hasn't made delay announcements either, in spite of admitting that it is "facing unique challenges and constraints" in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. However, some of its titles are delayed, including Minecraft Dungeons and Wasteland 3.
