At least in-part due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, UK Black Friday physical game sales were down 20 percent from 2019, with Nintendo standing out despite the recent release of Sony's PlayStation 5 and Microsoft's Xbox Series X. However, while physical sales were lower than they have been, mobile game spending hit record highs in the UK on November 27.
UK residents collectively spent $6.5 million on mobile games this Black Friday alone, according to Sensor Tower data acquired by GamesIndustry.biz, which is apparently up 16 percent from the amount spent in 2019. Total app revenue was $10.5 million, up 23 percent from last year, and all together there were 2.2 million new mobile game downloads on Black Friday.
Moon Active's Coin Master was the highest-grossing mobile game, which makes sense given Sensor Tower reported that Coin Master was the top-grossing mobile game in both Great Britain and Germany for months in a row as far back as October 2019. The runner-up titles were Roblox, soon after developer Roblox Corp. went public on the stock market, as well as King's quintessential mobile puzzle game Candy Crush. However, the exact amount of money made by any individual game is not specified.
Though the ongoing coronavirus pandemic may explain a dip in physical sales on the whole, a surge in mobile game revenue and downloads may be the result of various popular mobile games releasing or coming to prominence in 2020. For example, InnerSloth's Among Us released in 2018 but hit its stride this year, and miHoYo's Genshin Impact is available on mobile devices as well as console and PC.
Many other mobile games have also continued to go strong throughout the year, such as Activision and TiMi Studios' Call of Duty: Mobile - which recently celebrated its first anniversary. Niantic's AR mobile game Pokemon GO has also had a particularly strong year in spite of the pandemic, as efforts from the developer to make the game accessible from home contributed to Pokemon GO seeing its highest player spending since 2016.
However, it is hard to pin any of these general trends to the UK specifically, as GamesIndustry.biz is only reporting on numbers there and said figures have not been released for other regions such as the United States. One data point that can be extrapolated upon is 63 percent of spending occurred on the App Store, with Google Play covering the remainder. With the release of Apple's iPhone 12 continuing a yearly trend for the tech company, it's likely the brand will continue to dominate.
Sources: GamesIndustry.biz, Sensor Tower