Digital game downloads pull ahead of retail
NPD released a report today saying that the PC gaming market is now 58% download sales, though only 43% of revenue — mostly because retail prices are higher. Both retail and download sales are dropping though — revenue is down 21% and unit sales down 14% over the last year.
Why? Well,
“The overall decline of PC games when combining sales via both digital downloads and physical retail sales is impacted by the expansion of social-network gaming as well as the continued expansion of free game options.” NPD analyst Anita Frazier said…
Digital game downloads beat retail store sales | Gaming and Culture – CNET News
Interestingly, the top five digital retailers for AAA show the power of using connectivity in a strong fashion: Steam’s on top of the list, and they by default install a startup-launching login widget; two of the top five are Blizzard and worldofwarcraft.com; and the other top five entries are EA.com and Direct2Drive.com. (The list of casual downloadable leaders is quite different).
Retail has been pushing used game sales for quite a while in order to drive revenue, of course, which by and large game publishers have not liked much (supposedly last year John Riccitello of EA compared used game sales to piracy). It wasn’t very long ago that Best Buy announced they were moving over to that model.
The downside to this may be that used game sales may start running into legal issues, if the battle around shrinkwrap licenses and first-sale doctrine for software continues the path of the recent 9th Circuit Court decision — basically, it said that software publishers can indeed say that you don’t own software, but instead just license it; and therefore can block you from resale.
All in all, the shift to a fully digital future is well underway, and I would expect retail revenues to keep declining. Some are happy about it, such as this guy:
And why not? Digital music can be played on any device. Electronic books can go anywhere the user goes. And streaming movies on demand is far more convenient than mailing discs back and forth.
Others will be less sanguine about the idea that their investments can be remotely deactivated, have curtailed legal (and illegal) uses, or simply obsolesce out of being usable when the licensing authority shuts down its servers.
8 Responses to “Digital game downloads pull ahead of retail”
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Awww, but I like mailing out my Netflix movies. I get great Blu Ray HD movies every 3 days in the mail for a mere fraction of any Internet package I have available to me.
I’m slightly worried about the Autocad software licensing ruling, but hopefully that decision can be limited to Autocad and ginormo-size software packages of it’s nature, while games/movies/media keeps its status as an animate object.
Well, the ruling just said that if a product is properly licensed, that you don’t actually own it, so first sale doctrine doesn’t apply; that’s pretty much in keeping with all precedent on the issue. But that autodesk license isn’t exactly set up how video game licenses are; I bet there’s grounds to attack any bans on used video game sales on the basis that click through and end user agreements aren’t valid license agreements. And I don’t think an autodesk style way of going about things is practical for the video game industry.
Trying to prevent used sales may require too much of a hit on sales in general to be worth pursuing. But there’d need to be a few more legal challenges before things were truly clear.
Game sales are down? Really? Given the current booming state of the world economy, I expected them to be going through the roof…
IP law is a mess/… the true evil is the break between tools and services that “some” cashed it on…and reapeated like mantra and spent billions on to convince others to believe in the last decade.
just because an item is virtual or boxed dosent define its value to society.
\in a world were 3d gamez are creating a destructive meme to the individual and his capability not to be a slave of a state, its ironic that Autodesk, built on “wink wink software adoption early on” now stands to control and dictate by rule of law that empowers only the tool maker/ even after they have profited in a past fair value exchange/ to a position of control over the artifacts created and whom can create and for what purpose.
i wonder if the judge was a video tech gamer? or just paid off from one.:) would serve you all right..:)
the lawyers are happy, you should know then its a mess for society. eh?
recent “law” memes
corporations are people…and all property is rental. and yous keep thinking youre building a “better” meta new world.? good luck.
im sure you learned all this from playing Civilization no? i didnt learn it from watching “1776” the movie musical..though i did learn to hum a few diddies.
before i read/see another TED gmaes are good for school- blathering out of yuse all… put down the game controller and find a history work book.
Playing the BIBLE the facebook game…or waiting to play the MICHAEL JACKSON MMO WORLD wont cut it.
reality is hard… virtuality SHOULD be harder… god help us if it isnt.
When you add the user object/Higgins card to that mix, the trap closes quite completely.
But the corporation as person is not a new idea. (I’m discarding ‘meme’. It adds nothing as a term to conversation.) That idea dates from a comment on a ruling from 1886. What has happened is a recent ruling makes it more substantial in terms of civil law.
We are on a rocky road. Bad ideas have been attached to trendy ideas to give them momentum. The web is the Judas Goat.
*All* computing is, at heart, a service.
(rant begins)
People don’t like computers. People wish they didn’t have to deal with computers. Computers are advanced cryptographical machines that people hate. Every time a leaky abstraction lets a little bit of a computer shine through the software, people hate it.
People hate hex codes and page files and registry keys. People hate physical boxes and swapping out RAM and knowing what their bus speed is. By extension, people hate physical discs that break when you scratch them and physical ownership of software.
The only people who love computers and to whom this stuff matters are programmers and hardware guys and other “computer people”.
(rant ends)
If you can get rid of the computer part of computer game playing, people will love you. Naturally people will be angry if you take their money and your license server goes down. But not because they care about software ownership. Only because you took their money and didn’t give them something of value in return.
The only people who care about hardware and software ownership are people who actually had *control* over the software and hardware in the first place, who could work with it and manage it and muck with it at will.
If you never managed to control it, why would you care about owning it?