September 8th, 2023, Lesley Simeon
In a recent YouGov survey, consumers across 18 international markets were asked about their preference for purchasing products from physical establishments over online. In this piece, we hone in on the trends surrounding video game purchases specifically.
Video games appear to be at the lower end of the spectrum in our listed options when it comes to consumer preferences for offline purchases. A mere one in ten consumers (10%) indicated a preference for buying video games in physical stores, a percentage that remains unchanged from 2022.
Let’s look at the proportion of consumers who would prefer buying video games offline by country.
Consumers in Hong Kong most likely to buy video games offline (25%); those in Denmark, Great Britain are least likely to do so (6% each)
Hong Kong records the largest jump in proportion of consumers who prefer buying video games offline compared to the share reported in 2022 (17%). Conversely, consumers in Indonesia are the least likely to buy video games offline (7%) - this figure marks a two percentage point dip from 11% in 2022. Figures in India have improved slightly - from 13% in 2022 to 15% in 2023.
UAE is among the top three markets among those covered in our survey, where consumers are more likely to buy video games offline in 2023. Less than two in ten (16%) consumers in UAE prefer buying video games offline (the figure back in 2022 stood at 14%).
In 2022, more than one in ten (15%) consumers in Australia claimed to prefer buying video games offline, than online. That figure has now slipped by five percentage points (10%).
Moving on to Europe, France leads the region with over one in ten (13%) consumers saying they prefer buying video games offline, than online - up from 10% in 2022. Polling data from other markets in Europe are a mixed bag. Since 2022, the proportion of consumers who prefer buying video games offline have improved in Poland (from 5% to 7%) and Germany (from 6% to 8%), while Spain has recorded a dip (12% to 10%).
Compared to 2022, a lower proportion of consumers in the US prefer buying video games offline than online in 2023 (from 12% to 10% respectively).
In the Nordics, while the proportions remain more or less the same in Denmark across both years, a higher proportion of consumers in Sweden are likely to buy video games at a physical store this year (from 8% in 2022 to 10% in 2023).
Explore our living data - for free
Discover more gaming and esports content here
Want to run your own research? Run a survey now
Make smarter business decisions with better intelligence. Understand exactly what your audience is thinking by leveraging our panel of 20 million+ members. Speak with us today.
YouGov Surveys: Serviced provides quick survey results from nationally representative or targeted audiences in multiple markets. The data is based on surveys of adults aged 18+ years in 18 markets with sample sizes varying between 437 and 2045 for each market. All surveys were conducted online in July 2022 and June 2023. Data from each market uses a nationally representative sample apart from Mexico and India, which use urban representative samples, and Indonesia and Hong Kong, which use online representative samples. Learn more about YouGov Surveys: Serviced.