GTA 6 reveal causes Xbox and PlayStation sales to jump by a third

What the report says

Listen now on Apple, Spotify or YouTubeIn This Edition,GTA 6 reveal boosts console salesNewzoo on friendslop, sequels and growthWho won Gamescom?Hello there!We’ve barely recovered from Gamescom (in truth, we’ve not recovered at all), and we’re now hurtling towards Tokyo Game Show. It’s actually my first visit to Japan in over 20 years of covering the business of games. A terrible oversight I am looking forward to addressing.After last week’s Thursday show/newsletter featured multiple interviews, we have a nice simple one for you this week. A few GTA stats, a bit of pondering on the future of the video game business, and an interesting observation on what caused the rise of friendslop.Enjoy!PS5 sales jump 33% following Netflix GTA 6 videoThe GTA 6 Netflix reveal has caused a spike in sales of PlayStation and Xbox hardware.According to Nielsen IQ, UK PS5 sales jumped 33% last week, while Xbox Series S and X sales leapt 34%.31.1 million people watched the Netflix deep dive into Grand Theft Auto 6, which has caused game consoles to sell out at retailers worldwide.

In the UK, just one model of the PS5 Pro is available to buy outright via Sony’s website, with almost every third-party retailer out of stock.Nintendo Switch 2 also saw sales rise a third, ahead of the console’s price rise this week.The news will come as welcome relief to the console sector, which has seen sales plunge as prices have risen due to high component costs. In the UK, console hardware sales by the end of July are down 14.4% year-on-year. This is primarily due to a fall in sales of PS5 consoles (down 32%).

Xbox Series S and X sales are actually up 3.1%.Meanwhile, in the US, console sales just had its worst July since 2020, when consoles were in short supply due to the COVID-19 pandemic.Newzoo’s Ronan Patrick warns that any uptick in hardware sales as a result of GTA 6 may not be as significant as hoped.“The PS5 in inflation-adjusted terms is 67% more expensive [than at launch], and Xbox is twice as expensive,” he told us on today’s The Game Business Show.“We expect, because of [GTA] and Call of Duty, to see an uptick in the install base, but nothing particularly massive.

Key details

But perhaps some of the fears are overblown when it comes to software. It’s important to remember that the lion’s share of time is often spent on older titles, and the closest analogy we have to a hardware shock is during the 2020-2021 GPU shortage, and you didn’t see engagement or revenue being taken off course. You basically saw a reallocation of spend into software.”Every market gets the real gameKeywords Studios is the games industry’s end-to-end partner, with 13,000 people across 26 countries helping studios build, launch and support games at global scale.

Supercharged by technology and shaped by long-term partnership, Keywords Studios connects specialist expertise around the player experience.For global impact, that means making scale feel local. Through localisation, QA, LQA and player experience expertise, Keywords Studios helps studios protect meaning, cultural nuance and in-context quality across every market, so players get the real game, not just a translation.“Friendslop is basically Roblox coming to Steam”Friendslop is proof that the wider video game industry can benefit from Roblox, suggests Newzoo management consultant Ronan Patrick.In today’s edition of The Game Business Show, Patrick talks about the potential positive impact of popular platforms like Roblox, and browser-based services such as Poki and CrazyGames.

These platforms may be taking up more and more consumer time, but they’re also leading to new types of experiences that developers can bring to more traditional places like Steam.“Friendslop is basically Roblox coming to Steam,” Patrick noted. “It’s the existing play pattern of highly casual, low graphical fidelity, and an overwhelming emphasis on doing absurd, funny, gimmicky things with your friends, and then that’s just being captured by Steam. We’ve done work on this. We’ve looked into the ultimate question of whether Roblox players age up or age out, and spoiler alert: the answer is both.

More from the announcement

But, that’s definitely one of the things you’re seeing happen, where as people age up, they’re still looking for these social experiences.”Patrick goes on to stress that this doesn’t mean all games should go down the friendslop route.“There is no one video game industry anymore. If you look at the people who play games, since 2000, we’ve gone from basically 19 to 39-year-olds, overwhelmingly men, to aging up and down simultaneously.