Pachter: 'We Now See Just How Wrong We Were'

[mrstickball]

RVDondaPC said:
Why does no one ever cite the increase in PSN/Live downloads? I'm fairly certain these numbers are derived from retailers and they do not track purchases downloaded from the networks. Music genre disc sales may be down but do they ever think that on a per unit basis they are bringing in more revenue because of increased downloads? The same can also be said for other game titles. Maybe instead of buying 6 games a year a consumer is buying 5 and purchasing DLC for those five games. It is becoming more common place for games to have DLC and some games have DLC that can add up to almost the same amount as the whole game cost.

NPD doesn't track digital sales.

This could explain *some* of the declines, but not all of them. It'd be nice to have a total picture, but we do not yet. Mobile phone gaming was phenominal this year, and we saw the rise of social gaming which is worth a pretty penny.

Unfortunately, these markets are still take up a fraction of the losses. Worldwide, mobile phone gaming may be worth $5-6 billion this year. Social gaming may be worth $2 billion, and digital downloaded PC gaming may be worth another $2b. We'll just have to see how things stack up.