Digital downloads now represent more than 50% of all game sales

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extintor

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#1  Edited By extintor

Apologies if this news has already popped up elsewhere. I searched and did not find...

According to the Entertainment Software Association's (ESA) "2015 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry" report, $22.41 billion was spent in the USA on video games in 2014.

The study was carried out by Ipsos MediaCT and surveyed 4000 households across the USA.

Some of the findings were as follows;

  • Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare was the top selling console game and the Sims 4 was the highest selling PC game.
  • Average gamer age is now 35 and 44% of gamers are women.
  • Perhaps most interestingly was the finding that 2014 was the first year so far where digital* sales were greater than physical sales (52 % vs 48%)

*Digital format sales include subscriptions, digital full games, digital add-on content, mobile apps and social network gaming

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DDI_Kazal_St_Drebin

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I am mixed on digital vs physical.

When it comes to Steam, clearly I fully support digital I think it makes a lot of sense from the consumer stand point of video games. Not having to have several disks that you lose and scratch and being able to uninstall games you aren't playing and reinstall without hunting for DLC codes etc whenever the urge to play a certain game hits.

But with the home systems its only because of what I perceive as a lack of control over content that I shudder. Truth be told I have a few games installed on my ps4. the rest are physical. Because of space limitations and my general distrust of sony hardware quality along with strict copy right protections I don't "feel" as if I have the same control over my purchased downloadable content that I do with physical copies.

If home systems were more reliable and I could be assured that I own my purchased content no matter what I can reinstall uninstall-install and play on a different system other than the one I own then yes, the digital copy should act exactly like a physical copy that is magically attached to your hand so you never lose it.

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Teddie

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@extintor said:

*Digital format sales include subscriptions, digital add-on content, mobile apps and social network gaming

Well there you go, then. Kind of a different beast altogether, and not really a fair comparison at all.

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Wacomole

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I've always been a big fan of having physical copies of games (as my wall of boxes would attest), but by some freak of fate the copy of The Phantom Pain I'm receiving will be the first physical disc for my launch-bought PS4. I don't even know if my system knows HOW to copy data from a disc.

It makes some semblance of sense, though, as I own physical launch-day copies of just about all of the other major Metal Gear Solid titles.

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Shindig

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@teddie: The very existence of Steam and how Valve operate kind of skew this as well. Cheap and disposable. Except its yours... forever.

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bceagles128

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You will never convert me to digital on console until you lower game prices to PC steam sale prices.

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Nodima

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Only physical game I've bought for PS4 or, honestly, since around the time I got my PS+ subscription in 2011 for PS3) have ben NBA 2K games. On PS3 it was primarily for the midnight release experience, but with PS4 it was only because I bought the console on Amazon, and since I didn't have the console yet I bought a physical NBA 2K14 alongside it. But I bought 2K15 digital and really can't think of a reason I'd buy a game physical at this point.

I was at my friend's apartment the other day and saw a box for The Witcher 3 lying on his coffee table and I was like, "woah, you bought that in a store?" It legitimately took me aback a bit.

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Ry_Ry

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I recently picked up Diablo 3 for the PS4 on disc only because it was $25 dollars cheaper than the digital version. My first physical console game since the PS4's launch.

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gravytrain

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I buy almost exclusively digital. The only time I don't is really Nintendo games because they never see discounts unless you buy the games physically.

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ThePanzini

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Inaccurate picture it's USA only Europe would be very different, data includes smartphone users and social games etc, numbers are sourced solely from NPD (which only track physical) dosen't mention any source for digital, no numbers from Valve their not an ESA member.

http://venturebeat.com/2015/04/16/bloodborne-sells-155k-digital-copies-as-demand-increases-while-social-gaming-keeps-falling/

Bloodbourne managed a sell-through of over a million copies in just 12 days. A good number of its first-month sales were digital: intelligence firm SuperData Research reports that 155,000 units of From Software’s latest were downloaded directly to the console — a nice surprise for the publisher.

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extintor

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#12  Edited By extintor

The trend they've identified clearly shows what we already kind of know/expect. Digital is the future.

From a consumer standpoint, I think it would have been kind of interesting to ask if game purchasers had done things like asked for refunds for, or sold on their used games? Did they pre-order ? What did they see as the benefit of doing so or not doing so..? etc. etc.

I'm also a little iffy about the way 'influencing factors' for game purchases have been broken down. It isn't clear if the % segments represent highest influencing factor or if some kind of weighted scoring system has been applied. Either way, I think that data isn't very helpful or representative because purchasing decisions from game to game don't always follow a consistent prescribed pattern. Comparing the process from one game to another game is like comparing apples and oranges.

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DonPixel

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#13  Edited By DonPixel

To surprise of no one. Turns out digital is more consumer friendly nowadays, steam refunds, way better prices (specially if you live overseas).

Do miss, old school PC Boxes :3 ; ) love it!

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bluefish

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A tonne of that money has to be phone games. Between that chunk and the Steam chunk it's still probably a mostly physical world on consoles.

Still though: I'm not looking forward to the digital future...

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sarahsdad

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When it lists subscriptions, I'd be interested to know how much of that is things like ps+ and Xbox Gold subscriptions.

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BeachThunder

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#16  Edited By BeachThunder

I'm actually not joking when I say that I constantly forget that physical games still exist. It's been so long since I've gotten a physical game...

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Hayt

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#17  Edited By Hayt

The worst part of phone games isn't that so many of them are so shitty it's that no one seems to exclude them in cases like so you end up with fucked up stats.

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bigsocrates

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I vastly prefer digital over physical. People say that we need to worry about digital services shutting down, and that's true (though Microsoft's backwards compatibility work has made me feel a little better about that, since it's less likely that digital services will be shut down if they are still profitable.)

On the other hand it's not exactly hard to lose access to physical games. They can be stolen, destroyed, or in my case I put a bunch of stuff in storage that I thought I would be able to get out relatively quickly but it's still there for reasons beyond my control. My XBLA games are not only still accessible on my Xbox 360 but will soon be equally available on my Xbox One for the most part, Physical games? A climate controlled storage facility in New Jersey.

Plus if you live in an area with small apartments storing a large physical game collection is a pain. I almost never buy physical these days.

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musubi

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#19  Edited By musubi

@beachthunder: Me and you both. Actually going to a store to buy a video game seems like such a weird thing to me now. Have not bought a physical game in years.

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penguindust

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I really like digital, but something needs to be done about storage on the PS4. I am at capacity already with my console and I don't have that many games! I mean, Call of Duty Advanced Warfare takes 50 gigs alone. Sony needs to allow gamers to use external hard drives like on the Xbox so we don't need to go through the process of swapping out internal drives. I really don't want to have to download and install 450 gigs of games again on a 2 terabyte drive.

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plop1920

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I'm still skeptical on all digital with the current consoles, mostly because I don't think microsoft or sony will keep their current services up 10-15 years going forward. If they find a way to offer compatibility with the next consoles then that's great. Still, I've been using steam since 2004, and because of the nature of pc being a upgradeable platform I don't have to worry about that.

Unless Valve suddenly goes bankrupt- it is kind of scary when I think about having 150+ digital games and not being able to access them

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deactivated-5a0917a2494ce

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@extintor said:

Apologies if this news has already popped up elsewhere. I searched and did not find...

According to the Entertainment Software Association's (ESA) "2015 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry" report, $22.41 billion was spent in the USA on video games in 2014.

The study was carried out by Ipsos MediaCT and surveyed 4000 households across the USA.

Some of the findings were as follows;

  • Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare was the top selling console game and the Sims 4 was the highest selling PC game.
  • Average gamer age is now 35 and 44% of gamers are women.
  • Perhaps most interestingly was the finding that 2014 was the first year so far where digital* sales were greater than physical sales (52 % vs 48%)

*Digital format sales include subscriptions, digital full games, digital add-on content, mobile apps and social network gaming

These stats are once again worthless as they don't provide enough detail. I want super specific information such as the average age of PC, Console, and Mobile gamers split up. What percent are male and what percent are female in each of those demographics. Also, for each of those, what's the time spent and split by demographics.

I also want to know Console digital sales as a percentage. What's their methodology? Is this percentage of sales based on units sold or dollars?

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deanoxd

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#23  Edited By deanoxd

Owning my PS4 since launch i only own 3 disk games (bought at launch) everything else has been digital, and i finally bought a Xbox one in july and it has never had a disk put in it. And have no plans to buy any disks this gen.

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@plop1920 said:

I'm still skeptical on all digital with the current consoles, mostly because I don't think microsoft or sony will keep their current services up 10-15 years going forward. If they find a way to offer compatibility with the next consoles then that's great. Still, I've been using steam since 2004, and because of the nature of pc being a upgradeable platform I don't have to worry about that.

Unless Valve suddenly goes bankrupt- it is kind of scary when I think about having 150+ digital games and not being able to access them

Valve has said they will remove Steam "hooks" from all the games if they ever end the Steam service, so it seems relatively safe so long as you have somewhere to download and store the games. They don't seem to be going out of service anytime soon either.

I think people are right to be concerned about Sony and Microsoft though. I think Sony is more worrying than MS. For one thing MS is just a healthier company financially. Sony really could go bankrupt, while for Microsoft that seems unlikely in the foreseeable future. Even if Windows lost marketshare or Office became less of a cash cow Microsoft has moved into cloud hosting in a huge way, and that business seems likely to stay around for awhile. Also Microsoft is touting backwards compatibility for the Xbox One which means they pretty much can't close down the 360 servers for as long as the One is viable (while Sony could more easily stop supporting the PS3) and it seems that Microsoft is moving towards integration of Xbox into Windows to the point where I would expect Xbox to migrate to a more Steam-like system within the next 10 years, with Xbox games playable on PCs.

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OurSin_360

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I've bought 3 physical disks in the last 2 years.

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Naoiko

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I still like buying physical games, but I'm not opposed to digital. I like being able to get used games off amazon, so I'd be sad to see them go away for good.

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mrbubbles

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I believe it. More and more developers are making their PC games download only (MGSV, Mad Max are two recent examples). I like to buy as many physical games as I can but the PC is my preferred gaming platform so I end up downloading a lot more games than I used to, which sucks.

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Yummylee

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Physical forever... or at least for as long as possible until digital takes over completely. If I could play games on PC then I guess I wouldn't have much choice, but for consoles at least then forever physical when given the option. Not only is it preferable, but digital console prices are also a joke, though only for games that otherwise have a physical version. Exclusively digital games are priced just as fairly as in the US.

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I hear these stats ALL the time and it's utter tosh.

I'm 35 so tick that box. I don't and haven't ever known a single female remotely interested in games.I know they're out there, somewhere. They're just absolutely nowhere near the number quoted.

The closest I get to seeing it is the cleavage on display on twitch. That shit just angers me.

I don't count anything to do with mobile platforms. The difference between the games industry and mobile industry is huge. You all know this of course. Don't kid yourself for arguments sake. 99.9% of the mobile games industry would not fly on a home console and core fans.

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SpaceInsomniac

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#30  Edited By SpaceInsomniac

@harrysound said:

I hear these stats ALL the time and it's utter tosh.

I'm 35 so tick that box. I don't and haven't ever known a single female remotely interested in games.I know they're out there, somewhere. They're just absolutely nowhere near the number quoted.

The closest I get to seeing it is the cleavage on display on twitch. That shit just angers me.

I don't count anything to do with mobile platforms. The difference between the games industry and mobile industry is huge. You all know this of course. Don't kid yourself for arguments sake. 99.9% of the mobile games industry would not fly on a home console and core fans.

They're definitely out there. My friend's fiancee has been a life-long gamer, and so are some of her female friends. My old boss was also a female gamer, as have been several of my co-workers. The thing is, while I wish we could get some reliable numbers for the ratio of female to male console gamers, in the end it doesn't really matter. Even if women only made up 5% of the console market--and I believe the number to be way higher than that--men like playing as female characters, too.

That's reason enough to put cool female characters in your games, which thankfully has been happening for years. It's especially true for games with multiple playable characters, or character creators, such as Super Mario Bros 2, Final Fantasy, Resident Evil, Diablo, Saints Row, Mass Effect, Street Fighter, Borderlands, and even the latest Call of Duty.

And while I can see how various suits at various publishers are probably too afraid to go with more central female characters in their games, and their marketing research is the reason developers have to fight to even put female characters on a box, I think they over estimate the effect that will have on their sales. Judging from the Black Ops 3 beta, guys really don't have much of an issue playing as a female characters, especially one who can see her enemies through walls and shoot them with explosive arrows.

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Deadlydog

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@harrysound: bruh your just to old or in the wrong place. I'm a freshman in college and like everyone here plays video games at times.