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Worldwide digital sales top $6 billion in August - Superdata

Tracking firm sees premium games getting more popular in China, with collectible card games the future of free-to-play

Digital game revenues continue growing at a double-digit pace. Tracking firm Superdata today released its digital game sales report for August, which found that worldwide revenues were up 11% year-over-year to $6.1 billion for the month.

Superdata CEO Joost van Dreunen attributed the boost to a number of successful games across the industry. Pokemon Go helped push mobile game revenues up 16% to $3.04 billion while the launch of No Man's Sky played a part in premium PC revenues jumping 21% to $401 million and console digital sales rising 16% to $399 million. Free-to-play PC MMOs only rose 8% to $1.41 billion, while the pay-to-play MMO segment continued its slide, dropping 4% to $226 million.

Interestingly, van Dreunen sees the pay-to-play model receiving a boost, at least in one region. He highlighted a shift in Chinese spending habits driven by NetEase-operated Blizzard titles like Overwatch and World of Warcraft. Overwatch has sold nearly 3 million copies in China, surpassing the performance of the company's previous premium release, Diablo III. What's more, NetEase changed its payment structure for World of Warcraft with the launch of the Legion expansion so that players can no longer pay by the hour and now must commit to monthly subscriptions.

"The success of both titles goes against the assumption that Chinese gamers will never warm up to paying for games upfront, and provides evidence that it is possible to convince Chinese consumers to purchase high quality full-priced games," van Dreunen said. "Whether this will fundamentally change the market remains to be seen, as local gaming behemoth and NetEase rival Tencent is still sticking to free-to-play."

Meanwhile in the free-to-play market, van Dreunen pointed to collectible card games as the market's "last untapped genre." The CCG free-to-play market is about $1.3 billion right now driven largely by the success of Hearthstone, but van Dreunen sees it growing by 8% in the next two years thanks to titles like The Elder Scrolls Legends and Gwent, as well as "unconventional" efforts like EA's Titanfall-based mobile card game.

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Brendan Sinclair

Managing Editor

Brendan joined GamesIndustry.biz in 2012. Based in Toronto, Ontario, he was previously senior news editor at GameSpot in the US.