but the next years will see a huge increase for digital. the last years already show that. maybe not that important now but in some years, more people will buy digital and less retailers will sell pc games which makes it even harder to buy a retail copy.

i don't want to see huge numbers for revenue, just interested to see the real number of sales.

38% sales means 38% more potentially satisfied customers. Satisfied customers do not wait for price drops. They talked to their friends about the game, full price or not, and some write an article on their blog about the game.

It's like PS plus, it's not direct income for the publisher, but it still a huge gain on the middle/long term.

It will rise, but the question is by how much over the next few years.

http://www.biu-online.de/de/fakten/marktzahlen/datentraeger-und-downloads/downloads-umsaetze-in.html

Seems like a huge jump from 2011 to 2012, but when you remember that that was the period where Vita and WiiU released and where 3DS got the price cut, which all had a bigger shift to digital than DS, PSP and Wii, it remains to be seen how much of the jump was actually due to the PC.

if telekom will be successful, digital numbers will even shrink

I don't see any sense in what you just said.
Does that mean that the other 62% that bought at retail are even more satisfied and will tell their friends as well, which leads to retail getting even more important than digital ?

Also yes 38% sold units, but only 11% revenue means exactly that games that are distributed digital are sold at a much much lower price. So the majority of people buy indie and budget games on Steam (or other digital distribution platforms) and buy the full priced games at a retailer.

What I meant is that low price sales bring as much revenues on the middle and long term than full priced.

BTW, IOS and Android sales would be interesting too, as it has become a large part of the gaming market.

This is only relevant for PC, since console digital sales are much lower than retail sales.

That is a theory but basically impossible to prove (unless someone invents a time machine).

There are however quite a few games that have sold well and were well received and the sequel couldn't match the sales (LBP2 for example).
What's the reason for that ? More than enough people could try it, so many decided that the game wasn't for them.

The same would happen to games that already start at a budget price. But the publisher gets only half the revenue from the guy who doesn't like the series.

The huge flaw with that logic is that there are already tons of games out there and people have barely enough time to play them. Price all games at $30 instead of $60, but then people would need to buy twice as much games as they already do and that's something that simply won't work.

Which the same reason why I don't think that services such as PS+ are very profitable, especially for the publisher. They get a tiny cut from the monthly fee, but their games go out for "free" to millions of PS+ users.
Let's say 1m PS+ users downloaded a game (for example Sleeping Dogs) and the publisher gets 10% of the monthly fee from these 1m people. That's ~$400k.
The publisher would need to sell ~30k copies to get the same amount of money.
Since these people downloaded the game, they were at least somewhat interested in it, so the publisher basically lost 1m potential buyers.
So on the long term the publisher could've surely earned more with the game.

Now the other side is that it could've attracted more people to buy Sleeping Dogs 2, but at the same time that could be offset by people who deliberately wait for SD2 to come to PS+ instead of buying it right away.


About iOS and Android games:
http://www.biu-online.de/de/fakten/marktzahlen/datentraeger-und-downloads/mobile-games.html

19m sold games in Germany, 2% of the gaming revenue.
Tiny.

I'm itching to see digital sales in any capacity, so this would be nice.

VGChartz is saved!!!!