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Foamer on 26 February 2010
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SnowWhitesDrug said:


80 million cards, that seems pretty good :) Is the $13billion inclusive of online bought games as well? like the entire pc gaming industry with yahoo and shockwave games etc?

I think so, yeah. This is the press release. Keiron Gillen did a more detailed breakdown here. A couple of his more interesting points-

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.

Chart Track believes there’s 250 million PCs which are “gaming PCs” – which leads to the question what an actual gaming PC is anyway – which is about equal to the total generation of consoles. And, in a real way, with digital distribution, broadband penetration equals the market. In which case, 450million broadband accounts is hefty. The market is being powered by three things – the growth of digital distribution clients (i.e. Steam and friends), the growth of virtual item games (i.e.Battlefield Heroes, Travian, any of the free to play stuff) and – the one of the three which I suspect most people reading this site overlooks – the growth of game-cards sold in non-game retailers. This is primarily kids without credit-cards.

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.

So it's very likely that DD has overtaken retail for the PC market by now. DD is the future- more profits, no second hand market to cannibalise sales and, in the case of Steam at least, no pre-release piracy- and I'd be amazed if the next generation of consoles didn't move away from the traditional bricks and mortar retail sales model.

Ultimately, though, sales and revenue figures are red herrings- what matters is that publishers and developers make money. There is obviously plenty to be made on the PC. otherwise it wouldn't get any games. The likes of Capcom and Square Enix jumping on board is a good sign that the PC market is in good health.