A number you might see a lot over the next few days is 14%. This is, according to the US games sales data compilers NPD, the percentage drop in PC game sales in 2008 from 2007, the market pulling in $701m. As reported by GameDaily, the figure suggests the PC has fallen in sharp contrast to the soaring figures for console sales. But of course this number doesn’t mean an enormous amount – it does not include so much of the PC market, including digital downloads, micro-payments or subscriptions. Which is a big deal.
As GameDaily mentions, NPD has recently started recording data that will hopefully give a better impression of the reality of PC game sales, and we might see the first of that as early as next week. And, as always, NPD is North America only, which is never the whole story.
But in the meantime, be ready for this 14% figure, that could be used as a weapon by those who want to imply the fall of PC gaming for many and various reasons. From the evils of the Big P to claims that the future’s all about consoles, it’s a number that meets the agenda of many. But it’s a number that, if anything, is likely to demonstrate the evolving nature of PC sales. Clearly we don’t know, and they could be falling, but this isn’t the data to show it.
It’ll be interesting to see how NPD calculates figures for digital transactions. Especially when companies like Valve are so peculiarly quiet about their numbers, and so much of the money changing hands for PC gaming is going directly into the pockets of independent developers, and not giganto-publishers who might need to boast such figures.
It certainly makes for interesting times. How interesting we’ll hopefully find out soon, as more relevant data becomes available. At the moment, measuring PC game sales by the number of boxes shifting from stores is like announcing a drop in album sales by the amount of vinyl being sold.
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I don’t want the death of Brick and Mortar since I rarely use Steam. You just don’t get enough for the price you pay.
1) Its sometimes more expensive on digital service then in shops, especially some games on Steam(I’m looking at you L4D and until recently COD4)
2)You have to wait for it to download, which takes ages for me. By the time i have downloaded it I could have gone to the store bought it installed it and gotten an hour in the game. Sometimes it takes even more time then that.
3)Most times you have to be online to play on some of the services. Also you have to have a program clogging up your system always installed.
But i still think Steam should say their sales otherwise the “PC is dead” people will just have more ammo every year this graph comes up and it shows a loss.
US retail sales only (has never been the most PC minded market anyway) for a year which definitely was a lot weaker on PC than the year before. For strategy games and shooters alone the 2007 lineup was much more impressive on PC than in 2008. Pure logic that downdrop I’d say. 2009 can (and probably will) improve on this.
And PC without boxed sales is a dead platform, digital delivery isn’t the chicken with golden eggs, not for devs and definitely not for consumers.
Last year I went from not trusting digital download to being a Steam convert. I must’ve spent £150-200 online, and maybe a similar amount on store purchases/play.com/amazon. I can’t say which was the greater spend, but I do know that digital downloads were significant.
And if you consider the WoW income each month is ~$100,000,000 (based on the 10mil members paying $10 each) then their yearly income is $1,000,000,000. Now that’s….hmm….more than double the 2008 figure alone.
I’d like real figures counting every possible revenue stream and to be able to compare them to each platform. Unlikely to happen, but maybe then I’ll believe what I read rather than seeing it as doomsaying.
Looking at just what I bought for the PC in 2008:
- half were downloads.
- 1/4 were collectors’ editions bought online for $20
- 1/4 were boxed games at standard price.
- except for a gift for my wife in November and one of the $20 deals, all the boxed games were from the first half of the year, before we changed ISPs and our internet connection got much better.
- we don’t own an XBox, a PS3 or a Wii. We do have a PS2, but I bought nothing for it this year and almost never turned it on.
- I did pick up a DS early in the year and have bought about as many games for it as I did for PC, but that represents about half the dollar value spent on PC games.
- what I actually played in 2008: mostly TF2.
A fellow named DG posted the following on Blue’s News. It suddenly makes everything clear:
For the umpteenth time, there is nothing known to be wrong with NPD’s data. There is plenty wrong with many people’s interpretations of it however (and gamedaily’s article makes for example).
That the NPD data does not include non-retail sales is not even a limitation when it is used by and as intended. It becomes a limitation when it is being interpreted as a barometer (or other indicator) for the entire industry, because that’s not what it is.
NPD sells their data to the retail gaming industry. That’s who they make their figures relevant for. Arguably, including digital sales muddies the waters and makes the data less relevant. I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, when they do start including digital sale data, they include it in additional notes and so on, so as not to disturb the relevance of their retail data.
I made a quick calculation of my game purchases last 2 years.
Retail: 1 (M:TW – Kingdoms)
Digital: approximately 70 games
I’m probably an extreme case though.
@SwiftRanger, but it’s a general note
I do not know what the situation in the UK is any more, but I am a Brit living in Chicago. Finding a games store with a decent selection of PC games is becoming increasingly hard. They generally either stock only console games or have only a handful of titles (big-sellers like WoW). I don’t think that a more robust lineup of PC games in 2009 will save PC game boxed retail sales.
Best Buy, Wal-Mart, and Target all have excellent PC game selections. I’d mention Circuit City, but they’re going out of business :(
Game-only retailers have crap PC game selections.
Wow – this is now officially an ubernerd blog. Markoff Chaney has commented on it.
On-topic, just why *are* Valve so cagey about Steam’s sales figures? Obviously the companies who have stuff for sale on there know how well their own stuff is selling, so it can’t be for fear of scaring off publishers or anyone. Or maybe it’s the other way around – the publishers don’t want anyone but them releasing sales figures? They don’t seem too fussed about the NPD data, though… a quandary!
Long live physical media! :)
Regarding the selection of retail Brick & Mortar stores declining:
I agree. I walk into most department stores these days and the selection is pathetic. I don’t know if it’s just the area I live in, but I imagine it’s widespread.
Thankfully Amazon.com doesn’t seem to have any problems stocking retail physical copies of games I want so I do 99% of my shopping there.
I will resist Steam, Impulse and their like until games simply aren’t available anywhere else. I’ll then take a hard look and ask myself do I really want to hand control of my collection to someone else, to decide when and if I’m allowed to play them.
Who knows, perhaps GoG.com will continue expanding and recent games will continue to be added (UT2004 as an example of a somewhat recent game).
Until then, Amazon.com it is.
I buy most of my stuff boxed – I am not especially passionate either way, but, as silly as it is, boxed games are in most cases cheaper and available earlier.
(Latest example: bought Mirror’s Edge on Tuesday in a store for 40 EUR, it wasn’t on Steam before Thursday for 10).
Digital downloads I bought last year: Sins of a SE, Trials 2, World of Goo, Hinterland, Defense Grid, Bionic Commando. And maybe 20 boxed games. Too many, anyway.
That should have said “it wasn’t on Steam before Thursday for 10 EUR more”, ie 50,-.
@dr_demento
I suspect they don’t release actual dollar amounts because if they did, they’d have even more competitors springing up overnight, taking away from their sales.
Only boxed games I bought last year were Red Alert 3 and Age of Conan (DOH). Other than that, it’s all been through Steam.
Wish there was a way for Valve to release their figures, without giving away how much they actually make (which is the reason they don’t publish their numbers I assume).
I’m probably about 30/70 on the retail Vs digital purchasing front. Play have been undercutting digital quite a lot and when we entered silly season, it didn’t make a whole lot of sense to blow more cash getting a lot of the triple A games via Steam etc. However without digital taken into account these figures are worthless. Albeit that we don’t know the numbers, and we might never know them, that so many publishers opted to release their new games via Steam, (even the ones with GFWL attached) since the fall seems indicative that it’s become very much an essential release avenue.
I don’t think I bought boxed games at all last year, not that I can remember anyway. I think I spent spent £150+ on digital downloads though.
Quite a lot of it was indie stuff too :) I think RPS was responsible for a lot of my purchases. PC gaming seems to be getting better for me, but maybe I just have more money now.
To throw in my 2yen, I bought several games in 2008 (thanks a lot, RPS, now I don’t have beer money).
Digital:
Mount&Blade (maybe 2008)
Stalker: Clear Sky
Boxed:
Far Cry 2
Fallout 3
Left 4 Dead
Spore
Indigo Prophecy
Beyond Good & Evil
I’m sure there are others, but can’t see/think of them now. FC2, FO3, and L4D I would’ve bought on Steam, would they stop blocking my credit card. You could also add audiosurf and multiwinia as casualties of sucky cc policies.
I thought it would be interesting to tot up my own PC game expenditure for 2008; it works out as :
* Online retailers: €252.94
* Steam/GOG/digital downloads: €104
* eBay: €39.20
* Bricks ‘n’ mortar stores: €34.99
Total: €431.13
My first reaction was: dear god, I’d better not tell my wife I spent _that_ much on games.
My second was surprise that almost 25% of it was digital downloads even though I’m one of those people who prefers having the box.
And even though I live in the centre of a major city and browse PC games stores most weeks, my expenditure in them is negligible since on the whole they’re way overpriced.
P.
gog, greenhouse and stardock: £42.85
steam: £686.21 :O :O :O
Actual shops: Not sure, but all I can think of right now is world in conflict, red alert 3, and a few budget games
I’m pretty confident at least 85% of my purchases are online
People have been saying this for months, nay YEARS about the NPD data – without downloads, it’s a complete and utter waste of time for the PC market. I feel sorry for the time that you guys waste every month posting this crap. If they ever get around to including digital purchases let me know, but how they can track it all is anyone’s guess. And what about those free flash games for example, whose revenue model works very differently?
NPD is good for one thing only: console sales.
In 2008, I spent about $500 on PC games.
$120 went to GameTap
$50 was for The Witcher BOXED
The rest was spent on STEAM
So, as others have pointed out, any count that doesn’t include digital downloads is hilariously wrong.
PC GAMING LIVES IN DEATH!
(Dies in life? Lives on dice? Dies of life? I never could remember which one was correct)
Yep – most of my purchases are on Steam these days. Interesting to note that some of the more interesting games on console are for download only too – PSN new games, Wii old classics.
The NPD numbers just get more and more pointless…
It’s not surprising to me that PC boxed sales are declining. I’ve given up shopping for PC games in the main retailers now because there’s a very very limited selection of games on offer. How can they get impulse purchase sales of boxed games if no-one is stocking them?
The majority of the boxed games I buy now I get online, with the occasional digital purchase from Steam. With obnoxious DRM schemes becoming more prevalent, I imagine I’ll be buying more games from Steam in the future – provided they use Steam DRM only, and of course providing the publisher decides to release them in my territory, and at a reasonable price.
I averaged expenses of 23.87(!) Euro per month ( ~31.75 USD ) for game software in 2008. About 50% where retail, all games for the Nintendo Wii (I had never played a Nintendo game before, so I bought the latest Mario kart,Mario Galaxy and Smash Brothers).
7% were spent on Amazon (The Baldur’s Gate Series and Grim Fandango).
23% on steam (GTA IV and Dawn of War Pack)
15% on impulse (Galactic Civilizations II Pack and Space Rangers 2)
5% went to 2D Boy
That is the most I ever spent on games in my life. Next year will hopefully a lot less, since I probably won’t buy another game for the Wii anymore and I bought more games this year than I could play.
I don’t feel _too_ bad for spending so much on games, because I do not watch or pay for TV anymore since 2007. And that saves me about 30-35 Euro each Month ( fucking television licence ) and also a lot of time.
One thing that I learned in ‘08 is that there is absolutely no relationship between the cost of a game and the amount of entertainment you get out of it: About 7 Days after I got GTA4 for 50,- Euro, I bought Space Rangers 2 for 2.4,-. And I a lot of fun with both games. The whole Baldur’s Gate Franchise was only 13.3$ …
I’m sure in 12 month there will be some special offer for GTA4 to buy it for $30 or so. Maybe it is a bad idea to buy any games at release at all.
“I’m sure in 12 month there will be some special offer for GTA4 to buy it for $30 or so. Maybe it is a bad idea to buy any games at release at all.”
I just got it from Asda online (of all places) for £24, which works out at $35; I think that’s the cheapest price I’ve seen it so far.
P.
You crazy British types and your lb.s (yes pounds) if anyone there doesn”t know the conversion rate, its about one pound to two dollars. So double all of those prices, and put a dollar sign in front of it. Thats why we think everything there is so expensive. Of course as I learned, you pay 70 lb.s for a pair of good jeans, we pay twenty bucks. so we pay twenty and you pay, 140, yeah I don’t think sales in other areas of the world can represent others, the difference is too big.
Shnyker: That’s incorrect since the pound plummeted in value. The internets put it at about 1.5 dollars now.
I just thought I’d say that I spent about about 2,10€ per day (768€) on digitally distributed games last year, and I’m a pirate.
I bought 4 boxed games including WotLK and AoC.
I bought 20 games (or more) on steam alone, this year. About about 4-5 as downloads. Bought 1 in a store.
What rationales are there for folks like Steam and Stardock not reporting their sales? On first thought it seems to me that their reporting their sales figures would provide a substantial boost to the PC games industry, as it would provide solid evdience that the PC is not even remotely dead. Surely such a boost would be in their interest. What am I missing?
Digital distribution is probably over half of PC sales.
Well as i read the gamedaily article, NPD did not say PC gaming is dead, and keeps no secret that the figure does not include #insert whatever they left out here#, so i think the flaks NPD got is undeserved. It is not they who interprete the numbers to mean “Death of pc gaming”, it’s the fanboys and …big Ps? (why it was of their interest to kill off PC gaming anyway? Besides, claiming something is dead NEVER make it drop dead, to kill it would take some action, like stop making games for pc, prosecute every WOW player etc, which I TOTALLY believe is coming)
*it is like calling console games dumbed down doesn’t suddenly make every console gamer’s brain rot*
And why all these “pre-emptive defence” even the bomb is yet to fall? It’s a (partial) number for yesteryear people, get over it.
@heliocentric
IIRC no console use online DRM? You can play a console offline for lifetime if you wish.
Though seen things as it goes, the compulsory-onlineness may as well infect nextgen hardwares. Alas, the horror of not able to be a freak who plays alone..
*additional question: what qualifies as the DRM people hate? Surely having to put in a disc doesn’t count?
“prosecute every WOW player etc, which I TOTALLY believe is coming”
..?
@Nick
it was supposed to be sarcastic.. I’m sorry if my limited grasp of English language made it sound otherwise
*addition for previous post. Maybe my lack of an Internet connection made me a little paranoid (recently moved, posting via mobilephone)
Thats ok, I was mainly seeking clarification – its not your grasp of language that is at fault, it is the nature of the internet.
lol at piracy, piracy is stealing the game, they said ONLINE SALES idiot, its called a catalog if you’ve never heard one and yes, they are online, ever heard of amazon.com? its something similar to that so before you yell piracy why dont you get the cutlass out of your arse and think before you post.
Buying stuff online is much better, you don’t pay for gas, you don’t have to pay as much since you can buy it from the developing company. there are so many things that are better about getting your stuff online and since more and more people are finding about how much better it is for you to get it online its only natural that stores arent selling as much when people find it much cheaper/easier to get their products online.