U.S. Digital Sales Up

[Aug 09, 2012, 10:07 am ET] - Share - Viewing Comments

The NPD group offers some information in advance of the release of its July report, revealing digital sales in the U.S. for the second quarter of this year are up 17 percent over the same period last year, reports MCV. They say this is not enough to offset corresponding losses of physical sales. "In the second quarter of this year, sales of content in a digital format have grown 17 percent over Q2 2011," said Anita Frazier, industry analyst, The NPD Group. "While this growth is in stark contrast to the declines in new physical software and hardware sales, the size of digital sales is not quite large enough to offset these declines, leading to an overall drop in consumer spending in Q2 by 16 percent."

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Re: U.S. Digital Sales Up

Aug 11, 2012, 16:58

Ant

Is this ALL digital stuff or just games? We need details!




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Re: U.S. Digital Sales Up

Aug 9, 2012, 15:56

jdreyer

I'm sure the fact that the current console generation is 8 years old has nothing to do with the decline in physical sales.

Also, I'd be interested to know what this report covers. Does it cover Apple's app store? Does it cover sales by Zynga?




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Re: U.S. Digital Sales Up

Aug 9, 2012, 12:58

SimplyMonk

Dev wrote on Aug 9, 2012, 11:15: Edit: This is what I was thinking of: blues link But its just a list of the top 5 heavyweights in the digital arena as of 2 years ago. 2 of them being the same company. And I can't see most of them being willing to provide info to NPD. So, I'm not sure if they are doing this or even if the practice is still valid, but Battle.Net used to use sequential order numbers when they sold digital products. When Starcraft II released, you could make a reasonable guess at what Blizzard sold digitally based on buying copies throughout whatever time period you wanted to capture. Now this is fraught with edge cases and other problems as ANY digital order would get an order number so you can't get accurate numbers for specific titles or even games at all considering that Battle.Net also handles sales of virtual goods. Outside of that, NPD is getting crap from Activision-Blizzard. Activision is insanely tight-fisted with their internal numbers and Blizzard takes it a level even beyond that. My best guess would be that they are looking at their own retail numbers and comparing that to reported gross and assuming that digital make up the difference. I'll also say that Blizzard is a horrible benchmark for the Digital industry. They would most likely be an outlier in any data set. EA might be a little better, but without some middle of the road companies giving up their figures your won't get an accurate representation even if you had EA's and Acti-Blizz's internal numbers. This comment was edited on Aug 9, 2012, 14:38.

Re: U.S. Digital Sales Up

Aug 9, 2012, 12:38

Retired

Hay....did you guys know grass is green? Water is wet? Sky is blue?

Re: U.S. Digital Sales Up

Aug 9, 2012, 11:40

Parallax Abstraction

NPD's march to irrelevance continues. This is like their retail numbers which until very recently, never included some of the biggest retailers like Wal-Mart. If there are multiple distributors that aren't sharing numbers, everything they make is a guess, meaning it's useless as any kind of industry measurement metric.




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Re: U.S. Digital Sales Up

Aug 9, 2012, 11:15

Dev

And since its missing steam, its COMPLETELY WORTHLESS. JohnnyRotten wrote on Aug 9, 2012, 10:30: It would be nice to know what companies participate in the NPD study. I couldn't find anything (although I didn't spend too much time on this). All we have at this point is some percentage X of the market had Y delta results from the last report. Their data is useless without knowing what X is, how relevant X is to that market, or what the delta is for X to size of market over time. I seem to recall a news blurb on blues with a list from when NPD announced they were going to start tracking digital numbers. Edit: This is what I was thinking of: blues link But its just a list of the top 5 heavyweights in the digital arena as of 2 years ago. 2 of them being the same company. And I can't see most of them being willing to provide info to NPD. This comment was edited on Aug 9, 2012, 11:21.

Re: U.S. Digital Sales Up

Aug 9, 2012, 10:30

JohnnyRotten

It would be nice to know what companies participate in the NPD study. I couldn't find anything (although I didn't spend too much time on this). All we have at this point is some percentage X of the market had Y delta results from the last report. Their data is useless without knowing what X is, how relevant X is to that market, or what the delta is for X to size of market over time.

Re: U.S. Digital Sales Up

Aug 9, 2012, 10:22

InBlack

Yes they are missing Steam numbers. I dont know if they extrapolate them somehow but I doubt it.

Im also pretty sure that this is for US sales only. Worldwide sales are ignored.

Also an overall drop in consumer spending by 16% is on par with how spending has dropped on other luxury goods such as books, movies, jewelry and other shit not really necessary for human survival. We are in a global depression after all.




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Re: U.S. Digital Sales Up

Aug 9, 2012, 10:17

mch

I believe they are still missing. Seems kind of useless without them.

Re: U.S. Digital Sales Up

Aug 9, 2012, 10:12

Prez

Aren't these numbers still missing Steam sales numbers? I remember reading that Valve doesn't report its sales data so the NPD simply doesn't include it. That's a lot of unaccounted for money if so.




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