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Mudface on 06 August 2009
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ioi said:

I'm not sure what you mean by your first sentence - how do you know that sales of digital download software isn't counted within the total sales on most publishers financial reports?

Also you say that Valve stated Half-Life had sold a million digital copies last year - isn't that stating how many were sold on Steam (unless I'm missing something)?

You have to remember how tiny the download market is in general - total annual revenue for XBLA + PSN + WiiWare / VC is around $350m for games total plus another $500m for PC downloads. This compares to over ~$25b for retail software sales.

 

Actually, digital downloads accounted for almost $3 billion on the PC in 2008, almost a quarter of its total worldwide revenue and nearly the same as boxed retail income.

We take a step to the world stage. 13 Billion dollars is the entire PC games market in 2008. In terms of the split, Chart Track believes 24% is retail, 46% online revenue services (i.e. Subscriptions, micro-transactins), 22% is digital distribution and 8% is ad-revenue. Of course, this is world-wide, and individual territories tell a different story. Asia, for example, where only 4% of the revenue is from boxed sales. All this compares to 32 billion dollars from all console sales.

I'd imagine the figures for DD in 2009 can only be higher.

As for COD 4, 2 million sales is a fine number for a multi-platform PC title with very high sales on the consoles. It'd be interesting to see how much money Activision made per platform, with a significant amount likely to have been bought through DD and no licensing fees, the PC version must have been very lucrative indeed and certainly well worth their while releasing. As for piracy- why worry about it? The people who pirated the game wouldn't have bought it anyway.