Jamie Vardy's having a party... (Well, FIFA is anyway)
Image: via NPDBROS

New UK physical game sales data has revealed the best-selling titles of 2019, alongside the news that gaming revenue has dropped in the region for the first time since 2012.

We'll kick things off with that top ten. The football loving nation has spoken once again as FIFA 20 takes top spot with 1.5 million sales - although this is less than FIFA 19's 1.9 million sales in the same time frame the year before. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare also achieved more than a million sales.

For Nintendo, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe unsurprisingly came out on top, actually selling 7,000 more physical copies in the UK than it managed in 2018. Pokémon Sword is sitting in seventh place, although if sales were combined with Pokémon Shield, the two games would have reached fifth spot with just under 430,000 combined sales.

Grand Theft Auto V remains a top ten game of 2019 despite launching in 2013.

Rank Game 2019 Sales
1 FIFA 20 1,502,191
2 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 1,192,211
3 Mario Kart 8 Deluxe 465,062
4 Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order 438,465
5 Red Dead Redemption 2 306,392
6 FIFA 19 278,417
7 Pokémon Sword 273,991
8 Crash Team Racing Nitro-Fueled 267,285
9 Grand Theft Auto V 247,357
10 Tom Clancy's The Division 2 237,226

As hinted at above, physical sales are noticably down year-on-year. According to GfK, 17.6 million boxed games were sold by retailers - a drop of 19.8% from 2018's total. Digital sales are on the rise, but only just, generating an estimated 1.1% more in revenue than last year.

GamesIndustry notes that this is the first time the UK games software market has seen a drop in revenue since 2012, although there is one potentially obvious reason for this. 2012 saw the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360 slowly starting to fade away with the promise of PS4 and Xbox One on the horizon; 2019 is in a similar state, with sales winding down ahead of the PS5 and Xbox Series X launches planned for 2020.

Did you buy many of the games listed above last year?

[source gamesindustry.biz]