Xbox Series S/X gets more playtime than PS5 in Italy but PS4 beats Xbox One

In a long article yesterday, Games Industry offered some insight into one of Europe's largest video game markets - which we still don't hear nearly as much about as with UK, Germany and France. We're talking about Italy, and in an annual report conducted by IIDEA, we get plenty of information.

Some of it is really expected, like how FIFA 21 was the most played game 2020 followed by Grand Theft Auto V (we assume very few of you are shocked?) and then FIFA 20 (they really, really love their soccer over there!).

But we also learn that video game spending is up by 21.9% during 2020 with €2.18 billion compared to 2019 with €1.79 billion. The largest part of this is digital sales, which shows that physical gaming is rapidly declining in Italy as well. Despite the increase in spent money, it was fewer consoles sold last year with 884,100 units (although we don't get a breakdown between formats other than 518,856 of them being the new generation + Switch). We assume a lot of people simply did not buy PlayStation 4 and Xbox One while waiting for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series S/X, and there was large Switch shortages as a result of the pandemic.

Gaming in Italy is slightly bigger amongst men than women with 9.4 million versus 7.3
million. The second biggest category of gamers are actually people aged 45 to 64, with 15-24 being the biggest one and 11 to 14 being the smallest.

PlayStation 4 users play the most on their console 6.3 hours per week. During this new generation however, it seems like Italian Xbox gamers spend more time with their console playing Xbox Series S/X for 4.2 hours per week, compared to 3.3 hours for PlayStation 5.

There's a ton more information to get on Games Industry, which we can recommend if you want to know more about a huge video game market we for some reason don't hear to much about in international press.