Video Games Digital sales vs Retail Sales Infographic

Everything is going digital now-a-days. If its Netflix, Steam, iTunes, or the Kindle store – they all are extremely rapid growing segments of their respective markets. Ever since we figured out the internet could replace the neighborhood Best Buy, any brick and mortar outlet has felt the effects of digital distribution.

Video Games are perfect for digital sales. Instead of waiting at midnight in a few hundred foot long line for hours just to play the new Halo a little bit before everyone else, I can go to my living room at midnight and instantly download whatever just came out. There’s less hassel, less packaging, and sometimes insane discounts.

Valve’s digital store Steam has been around for quite some time and has made Valve a hefty sum of cash. They don’t seem to follow the video game pricing rules though. First off, they give away their most popular game. Who does that? Who thought that giving away their most played game for free would be a good idea, but it was!

The video game business is changing, and I think for the better. Soon a new release will be priced depending on how good the game was, not on how recently it was released.

We’ve been told for the last couple of years that digital is the way of the future and that retail sales of games are all but down and out, but how true is that in 2012?

Well thanks to statista and the ESA we now have an idea of how it looks in the US market at least. Taking into account the US has a solid Internet penetration, not quite as good as some Asian countries but still better than average.

We can presume South Africa is on a similar trajectory if still a few years behind thanks to Telkom and their limited ADSL offerings.



So the big talking points on this one that I saw are that obviously physical retail copies are still far and away the dominant form and while digital is obviously growing it is still a long way behind, and in fact if you look at the *’s it’s even further away than it looks.

Take a look at the caveat under the digital sales compared to retail sales (includes add on content and social net work gaming). Which means under digital sales they are including Call of Duty map packs which are absolutely huge along with things like Farmville and the like which don’t feature in the thinking of most AAA console game developers.

So while gaming as an industry is growing and pulling in new gamers the core gamer that you pretty much all are for reading this is still massively dependent on retail and physical copies and that isn’t going away anytime soon.

I’m not entirely sure if I care whether my game arrives in a box or through the Internet right now but I know for many the actual physical copy is a big deal.