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Report: 48% of PC Games Bought in 2009 Were Digital Downloads
by Alice O'Connor, Jul 21, 2010 8:00am PDT[Update - 10:20] We've removed a misunderstanding from our reading of the report.
Digital distribution accounted for 48% of PC games sold in the USA last year, according to a new report from market research firm The NPD Group.
21.3 million "PC Game full-game digital downloads" were purchased in the USA in 2009 while 23.5 million physical units were bought at retail during the year, according to NPD's figures. DD raked in 48% of unit sales and 36% of dollar sales.
The group also offers its own ranking of the various digital distributors, divided into categories of "casual digital retailers" and those "which often focus on titles that are also offered in retail stores as physical purchases." The ranking supports Direct2Drive's refutation of Impulse's claim that it held second place in the PC DD market, at least.
Top 5 Frontline Digital Retailers - 2009 (based on unit % share)
- Steampowered.com
- Direct2Drive.com
- Blizzard.com
- EA.com
- Worldofwarcraft.com
Top 5 Casual Digital Retailers - 2009 (based on unit % share)
- Bigfishgames.com
- Pogo.com
- Gamehouse.com
- iWin.com
- Realarcade.com
NPD notes that the market share of "Casual Digital Retailers" declined in 2009 over the previous year, which the group speculates is in part due to "the increase in popularity of free social network gaming and free mobile gaming."
"The popularity of social network gaming increased from Q3'09 to Q4'09 as 4.8 million more people played games on a social network in the U.S.," said NPD analyst Anita Frazier. "This demonstrates how consumers can now experience casual types of games through myriad vehicles, broadening the competitive landscape."
Two separate surveys served as the foundation for the report--a quarterly survey of 8,000 members of its "online consumer panel" and a weekly survey of 180,000 members.
Comments
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I for one don't buy games on disc anymore. Except for Blizz games. Everything else is on Steam.
Steam makes it so easy. A few clicks and BOOM, game is downloading. Steam is the same as iTunes. Make stuff easy to buy and good prices and people will buy it.
No one can argue that the Steam deals that they run are crazy. I've bought more games on sale then anywhere else.
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They got these "results" from an online survey. Yeah, those are known for being incredibly reliable. Not to mention that none of the numbers came from the companies themselves. And there is a huge bias there. Most of the people likely to take an online survey are probably the same people who are buying their games digitally.
And for selling (supposedly) a total of 44.8 million games, that's a rather small sample size. Each one of those people surveyed would have to have bought about 250 games just in that year.
And finally, Blizzard is on the list twice. Seriously? How are blizzard.com and worldofwarcraft.com both on the list? They're the same company!
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I'm not trying to complain or anything, I really don't know why companies that make buhzillions of dollars suddenly become less productive (it seems). Like Blizzard. WoW makes them $8 billion a month but they haven't done anything non-Warcraft related in almost 10 years. Someone please explain this all to me.
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Lessons to be learned, publishers, lessons to be learned.
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The study is only about US, so how knows. D2D is not very used in Europe.