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GamesIndustry.biz presents… The Year in Numbers 2020

Featuring the global games market value, boxed vs digital spending, best-selling games, and - of course - pets

Christmas looms like a slightly obscured beacon of relief in the murky fog that is 2020, and here to guide you along the way is our annual infographic.

For the fifth year running, we've attempted to break down the biggest stories, trends and growth areas of the past 12 months into a single image, plus an assortment of statistics that can be firmly filed under "Huh, that's interesting."

You can scroll down to find the 2020 edition of our Year In Numbers infographic -- and keep scrolling if you want to reach the very end of it.

Along the way you'll discover the estimated value of the global games market, the best-selling games of the US, Japan and the UK, the year's highest and lowest-scoring games on Metacritic, the most covered/searched/tweeted/livestreamed titles of 2020, and more besides.

And, as a special treat this year, an exact and very scientific tally of the types of pets that industry professionals own, as recorded by our Creature Comforts column. Because we've definitely catalogued all of them now. Definitely.

Before we assault your eyeballs with more facts and figures that your brain could possibly handle, we'd like to thank the following:

  • Newzoo, for the global games market value and boxed vs digital revenues
  • Sensor Tower, for the biggest mobile games, publishers and countries by revenue and downloads
  • GfK Entertainment, for the UK's best-selling boxed games of the year
  • NPD Group, for the US' best-selling games of the year
  • Famitsu, for Japan's best-selling boxed console games of the year
  • ICO, for the most covered games
  • Fancensus, for the biggest influencers, livestreams and most discussed games on Twitter
  • Ampere Analysis, for the crossover in console ownership in the UK
  • Niko Partners for the number of gamers in China
  • All the people who sent in photos of pets, because frankly that's what we all needed in 2020

Enough words, more graphs. Please enjoy the 2020 edition of our Year In Numbers infographic (and don't forget to click on it to open a larger version)

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James Batchelor avatar
James Batchelor: James is Editor-in-Chief at GamesIndustry.biz, and has been a B2B journalist since 2006. He is author of The Best Non-Violent Video Games
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