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UK digital game sales top £550m in 2012; physical retailers fare worse, blame slide on “a lack of compelling new titles”

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A report published by the Entertainment Retailers Association this morning saw 2012’s digital entertainment sales in games, music and films cast in stone as over £1bn, the highest annual total on record. Over half of that cash was made by videogames, if you can believe that – a 7.7% taller money pile that was transmuted from pixels the previous year.

Digital entertainment sales now represent a quarter of the market, partly as the result of a 17.6% dip at physical retailers. Games retailers were particularly badly hit. And the reason for that, they told the BBC, was “a lack of compelling new titles” in 2012. Huh.

Their sighs of disappointment were echoed by Metacritic at the start of this week, who did a bit of maths, totted up some scores, and discovered that the overall goodness-per-videogame in the past 12 months “paled in comparison to recent years, at least at the high end of the scale”.

“In fact, since we started publishing these year-end reports in 2009,” said Meta-man Jason Dietz, “we have never encountered such a low total number of great games in a single year.”

Oh, no. Please say it’s not true. You didn’t go through 2012 thinking you were enjoying games, did you? This is priceless. You thought life was better for XCOM? The Walking Dead? Dishonored? Planetside 2? World of Tanks? Far Cry 3? Well – you’re objectively wrong.

God, you’re a sorry lot. Why not flop limply to the floor now and roll gently into the sea, so as to cause minimum fuss?

Thanks to both the BBC and MCV.