gergroy said:
Mudface said:
| shio said:
There are more PC games being bought on Digital Distribution than on Retail, right now.
|
Yep.
I disagree with a lot of your last post- COD 4 sold very well, but it isn't a Half Life/ Sims/ WoW seller by any means, and it won't get anywhere near 10 million sales- but I'd agree totally with the quoted statement, given the figures I posted earlier.
Frankly, I'm utterly amazed that the owner of a site dedicated to video game sales is so completely out of touch with the size of the digital download market.
|
lol, or maybe you are out of touch on the size of the digital distribution market. ioi has a lot more data and experience in this area than we do and I think he would know better than us. Also, he isn't the only one that thinks that. NPD came out and said that digital distribution only acounted for about 5% of the gaming industry.
Now, if you include piracy in digital distribution, than it might be as big as you think, but the people that actually pay for digital downloads are still pretty minor.
|
Did you read the article I linked to? Here it is again. Do you know who Kieron Gillen is? He's a proper journalist, writes for the Guardian and that, dontcha know. Basically, he doesn't need to make things up to sell a web site. Do you know who Chart Track are? They're the UK equivalent to NPD. They don't need to make things up either. Why would they?
As an out to your hero, the article states US DD was around $600 million last year, which isn't far off the number ioi quoted. But, and here's the big thing-
How big is digital distribution? In terms of the core-market – that is, gamers like us buying on clients like Steam -they estimate 600 million dollars for the NA market. They believe it’ll break the billion – 1068 – in this year. The real question is why aren’t these in the charts. The problem is that while some retailers are interested in it – especially certain individual companies – others are more reticent. Since most of the individual publishers have their own direct download solution, you need more than a few token ones to avoid skewing the chart. I approach Bloch after the panel to ask when he thinks people will move this way – Valve’s reluctance to release actual hard data is something that regularly frustrates me – he believes it’ll work similarly to how digital sales worked in the music industry. That is, a gradual uptake, with a give and take of information – a little at first, and when nothing terrible happens – a little more. Soon we’ll reach the point where it becomes clear that not giving up numbers leads to less publicity compared to those that do. In other words, it’s a slow natural process and we have to wait for it to work out.
VG Chartz just seems massively out of touch with DD. As it's the next big thang, I'd suggest they get on it.
