So getting an email with a cd-key you insert into steam/origin/etc counts as physical too then? Explain to me what you think is digital sale?

There's hundreds of different retailers who only sell games digitally unlike on consoles where you buy directly from the online service provider, which itself usually asks more than what you pay getting a physical copy. VGC definately can't accurately track them all. Only EA or Respawn can tell how many games they have sold in total.

I think my post was strictly related to the topic too, tbh.

If the key is from the physical copy(printed), then of course it's physical.  Direct steam/origin/etc sale.

I wasn't talking about you, but about people comparing full markets, while the question is different.

Don't think it quite works that way, digital retailers buy cd-keys only without the physical copy. Would be rather silly if steam buys 100,000 copies of each game just to take cd-keys from them then store all those games somewhere or recycle them, thats just wasted work and misuse of resources. Would cause a ragestorm with some environmentalists too.

Not to mention the cost of buying a physical copy then selling the game cheaper than it is at most retailers like gamestop who sell the physical copy directly to the customer for a very small profit margin, that would be selling for a loss. The reason digital is such a big thing on PC is because you don't pay for the manufactoring process of the case, manual and disc at all and theres no royalty tax to anyone, which is why u can even get a new game for half the price of a new game on consoles.

I'm not, you misreading...)

"Steam/origin/etc" don't, private traders(and you are talking about them, i suppose) do.

Pirates :P

I'm not talking about private traders at all though...I know some people buy CD-keys from cheap countries and you require some VPN to activate them, but I meant mostly the bigger retailers that only sell local CD-keys. Steam is kinda blocking foreign keys from working outside regions now anyways.

Unless I'm mistaken, VGC numbers do not account for DD sales, which would only be available from the direct distributers themselves. Taking that into account, no one that I'm aware of compiles DD figures along with estimated retail unit sales.

EA would have to release their Origin sales figures, Valve their Steam sales, etc. As far as I know (didn't bother with a 30 second Google search) they don't release those figures.

It's well known that the vast majority of PC game sales have shifted to DD and that retail copies are for all intents and purposes, a legacy distribution format that does little to extend availability of product to broader markets.

It's fair to say that retail copies of PC games probably comprise less than 10% of total sales, making the monitoring of these figures an extremely poor gauge to measure the current size of the PC gaming market.

I think sega is doing pretty well with the pc with their football manager and total war series.

ea is also doing fine ... I think they had a revenue of ~$1.1billion for ps360 each for fy 2013.
pc revenue sits at ~$900mio. So it only has $200mio less revenue, but they didn't have to pay idk how much money to sony/ms in licence costs.
So its obviously more than just 25% of the sales.

Skyrim is your example? Really?

Every The Elder Scrolls and Fallout game is crippled on consoles without the option to use all these great MODs.

for multiplat games they are mostly less than 360 and PS3.
Some quite significant as in CoD, some less significant as seen with Skyrim for example.

Especially during the time where PS3 was catching up to 360 (2009-ish) PC software sales were mostly very similar to PS3 software sales.

Could be seen very often when publishers announced their numbers.