German games industry grows by 9% in 2018 YOY, driven by in-game purchases

[konnichiwa]

Ka-pi96 said:

Bofferbrauer2 said:

Well, parts of it are. Online Subscription services and in-app purchases are growing fast.

However, videogame sales dropped by 10%, Gaming hardware by 8% and Videogame subscriptions (like for WoW) even dropped by 24%.

In other words, less games are selling, but that's getting outweighted by what they sell afterwards.

That's the significant one for me.

Hardware sales should be expected to decline towards the end of a gen, no surprise there. Game sales could be down just due to fewer popular releases than the previous year, it doesn't mean too much by itself. That's a pretty big decline for MMO subcriptions though! I wouldn't be surprised if the MMO market itself never declined at all (due to microtransactions) but personally I've always found subscription based MMOs to be of much higher quality than F2P microtransaction focused ones so it's definitely a big negative to me.

Well if you spend money for PS Now/Gamepass you expect people to buy less games. DVD/bluray sales dropped 25% in a few years thanks to streaming.