Birmingham Tops List for Buying Most Violent Videogames

Birmingham has topped a list of areas that apparently buy the most violent videogames. It was followed by Newcastle and London.

It's not, it must be said, the most thoughtfully put together list in the world. For one, there's no word over on PriceSpy, where it comes from, on whether that's in terms of the raw number of games bought or per-capita.

You'll also notice that the list is a peculiar 44 entries long. That's because those are all the areas PriceSpy bothered to include.

The Daily Mail, delightfully, has this headline: "Birmingham is the violent video game capital of the UK - and sales are linked to the area's high crime rate, finds poll". That's not something the poll really finds, so much as something the Mail says. "Figures from UKCrimestats.com also found London, Birmingham and Newcastle all rank in the top ten constituencies with the highest crime rate in the UK - in first, fifth and tenth place respectively," reports the Mail Online. It then says that certain areas near the bottom of the list such as Oxford, Reading and Cambridge have lower crime rates.

A thorough analysis it is not.

The data was collected from October 2013 to October 2014 and relates to purchases of GTA IV and V, Battlefield 3, Call of Duty: Black Ops 2, Dead Space 3, Saints Row 4, Hitman: Absolution, God of War: Ascension, Dead Island: Riptide and Mortal Kombat.

1. Birmingham
2. Newcastle upon Tyne
3. Gtr London
4. Leicester
5. Southampton
6. Norwich
7. Wolverhampton
8. Belfast
9. Northampton
10. Edinburgh
11. Sheffield
12. Cardiff
13. Liverpool
14. Bournemouth
15. Nottingham
16. Bristol
17. Stoke-on-Trent
18. Brighton
19. Leeds
20. Glasgow
21. Durham
22. Canterbury
23. Bradford
24. Manchester
25. Wigan
26. Lincoln
27. Truro
28. Derby
29. Inverness
30. Slough
31. Gloucester
32. Chester
33. Hull
34. Preston
35. Oxford
36. Doncaster
37. Stockport
38. Dundee
39. Aberdeen
40. Wakefield
41. Sunderland
42. Cambridge
43. Plymouth
44. Reading