UK game retailers Play.com and GAME have reported a boost in sales following last week’s BAFTA videogame awards.
At the videogame-focused awards held last week by the British Academy of Film and Television Arts, games like Super Mario Galaxy, Call of Duty 4, and LittleBigPlanet were acclaimed for … well, being awesome. It seems, though, that the BAFTA awards didn’t just benefit the handful of prizewinning titles, but the industry across the pond as a whole.
According to MCVUK, UK online retailer Play.com showed a 14% increase in new customers over its target goal the week after the BAFTA ceremony. Terry Scicluna, COO of Play.com’s brick-and-mortar competitor GAME, concurred: “The reaction in GAME stores and online to the BAFTAs has been fantastic.”
GAME heavily promoted the BAFTA nominees and award-winners on its shelves, labeling them as such – and found that approximately 60,000 people voted for their own choices in the BAFTA awards via the GAME website.
Nor was it just the games industry enthused over the sales spike – BAFTA’s head of Awards, Anne-Marie Flynn, cheered the news as well: “BAFTA’s power and influence in terms of films can have a major impact on the box office. This year in games we received more media interest than ever before, so it stands to reason that this heightened profile and awareness would translate into an upsurge in sales.”
Hear that, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences? You better be giving Street Fighter IV an Oscar this time next year if you know what’s good for you.
