Chart-Track reports shrinkage of 29% in February UK market

I really hope we can get digital sales in sales data soon, the music industry is often seen as slower to adapt than the games industry but they've been able to do it for years. I bet with digital sales we'd see at least a very close number, perhaps even higher than last year.

Posted:A year ago

The problem is that we'll never see full sales disclosure from Steam, XBLA or PSN. There's an argument that including some but not all digital sales will skew figures to an even lesser degree of accuracy.

Posted:A year ago

Unlikely that digital sales make up that shortfall. That seems to be the wishful thinking from our industry at the moment. The problem is that revenues earned by companies (which are reported) are clearly showing this is not the case.

Most people seem to be either buying from bricks and mortar shops, online brick and mortar shops like amazon or as a last resort digital. In the case of digital I already know a few people who have adopted "no physical copy to be had so I gave up!" attitude. In this regard lost shop sales in no way are translated into equivalent digital ones. The almost identical price is already being seen by consumers as a blatant rip off.

Posted:A year ago

Yup, we need digital sales but what was doing so well in February 2011 to have such weak comparables?

Posted:A year ago

@ Peter

And then you have people like me (though I'm not sure how many there are of us), who won't buy physical unless there's a code that we can register on Steam or Origin, and it's cheaper than a digital release. We probably don't amount to that many, but when you consider how much cheaper digital copies can be compared to physical, it's (probably) a number that's growing.

Posted:A year ago

I do like how there's this article that points out "doesn't include digital sales", and then right near it on the same page a headline about how rich Gabe Newell is. :)

Posted:A year ago

It is not just digital distribution, it is also platform proliferation.
Free to play MMOs like Runescape and Habbo are massive. As are all the Chinese MMORPGs like Evony. Then there are games on some of the social networks. Plus the huge renaissance in PC gaming. Which is all before the veritable explosion in mobile. The Apple App Store alone has 25 billion downloads to date. And the iPhone is not even the number one smartphone.
So counting the sales of plastic and cardboard is only a measure of how quickly the public are moving away from retail distribution. In the real world far more games are being played for far longer by far more people than ever before. Gaming is expanding at one of the fastest rates in its entire history.
Angry Birds has 700 million downloads. That is more than the total installed base of all 5 playstation consoles. plus both Xbox consoles plus the Wii. Consoles are increasingly irrelevant except to the minority hard core audience.

Posted:A year ago