Black Ops brings in £82m in UK games' "biggest week ever"

The UK games market has seen its biggest grossing sales week ever, according to UKIE, helped in no small measure by the phenomenal retail performance of Call of Duty: Black Ops.

Treyarch's shooter sold 1.4 million copies in the UK on its first day alone.

UKIE revealed the game saw 2 million sales over its first five days, bringing in an estimated £81.9 million. This broke Modern Warfare 2's first-week sales records of 1.8 million and £67.4 million by 13 and 21 per cent respectively.

Microsoft's Kinect was the other big news in the market last week, releasing on 10 November in a huge, $500 million marketing push by Microsoft for consumer's Christmas cash.

The impact on the charts was mixed, with Kinect Sports the highest charting Kinect title, entering at fourth. The next best-selling Kinect title was Dance Central at 13. No figures were given for Kinect Adventures, the game bundled with the Kinect hardware.

"The video games and interactive entertainment industry has already seen a great start to quarter 4 2010 and the success of Call of Duty: Black Ops and Microsoft's Kinect adds to this," said UKIE director Michael Rawlinson.

"The positive sales figures of titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops, new hardware launches like Kinect, the emergence of casual/mobile games like Angry Birds and Cut the Rope and social networking games such as Farmville show that video games and other forms of interactive entertainment continue to be played by more people than ever – with 1 in 3 people in the UK now being gamers." 

"Given the huge audiences for games on all formats, 2010 has been a year of unprecedented activity and focus. And with more video games than ever before being played, on an ever growing range of games consoles, PCs, mobile phones, mobile devices and internet enabled TVs, the industry has widened beyond all expectations and will continue to expand exponentially in 2011."

The week also saw Fable III drop dramatically down the chart, slipping to sixteenth from third after just one week at number one the week prior to that. Last week's number one, Football Manager 2011, slips to fifth while FIFA 11 holds on to second.