Supermarkets lagging behind in race to grow gaming share

Supermarkets continued to increase their share of the video games market in 2011 - but not as quickly as specialist and online retailers.

The news comes at the end of a tough 12 months for the category. Total games sales fell 10% last year to £958m, according to Kantar figures compiled exclusively for The Grocer, while console games were down 8.9% to £847m [52w/e November 2011].

Grocery grew its share of the market - by 0.5 percentage points to 17.9% in games and 0.6 points to 19% in console games - but in both cases this was behind the growth posted by online and specialist retailers. Catalogue retailers lost market share.

A shocking 95% of the decline in the market was a result of falling spend on Nintendo games and hardware, according to Kantar. Many of the casual gamers that products such as the Wii brought in were now leaving the category and only a fraction of this trade had switched to the Xbox 360, said analysts.

However, products on the horizon - including the Sony Vita handheld and Nintendo’s Wii U - meant things could look “very different” in a year, said the Entertainment Retailers Association.