Actually, they aren't a good indicator of retail sales because they don't even include Wal-Mart, the biggest retail chain in America.

I don't know where you got the idea that NPD doesn't track Wal-Mart, but that's wrong. See http://www.npd.com/corpServlet?nextpage=consumer-tracking-walmart-sams_s.html It's also mentioned on http://www.npd.com/corpServlet?nextpage=entertainment-categories_s.html

they they still only include U.S. sales numbers

Actually Canada and Australia game sales are available too.

The issue is that the NPD stats do not give a good representation of how well PC games actually sell

No, they do give a "good" representation of at least the North American market. They simply aren't the most comprehensive representation of the market possible.

which leads many to believe that you can't survive on PC games alone.

No one of importance who works in the business side of the video games industry is making platform target decisions based upon NPD numbers alone. They are just one part of the data available used to make such decisions.

You can download five gigs in two hours or less on most connections.

Not on most residential broadband connections in the U.S. you can't. For example, AT&T, which is now the largest telecom company in the U.S. due to consolidation, offers four tiers of residential ADSL service with ~155/155/310/620 Kbytes/sec maximum downstream respectively. Only the lower two tiers, which are actually the same downstream of 155Kbytes/sec, are available in all of the areas that AT&T has certified for ADSL. The availability of the highest tier service is relatively rare due to distance limitations, and most AT&T customers aren't paying the extra money to get it even where it is available. (These figures and information comes from an AT&T engineer I spoke with last year) But, even at the highest level of service, a full 5GB download would take at least two and a half hours assuming that the server could and would deliver all of the game's data at that maximum speed. So, double that time for each tier of service, and you find that it can take at least ten hours to download a 5GB game for many if not most U.S. broadband customers. Yes, AT&T isn't the only broadband Internet provider in the U.S., and yes, broadband offerings vary with other technologies like cable, but it is still a good indication of the Internet speed limits that many U.S. consumers have.

If WoW was actually offered as a download, I bet it would do very well.

I doubt it, and least not in the U.S. I once attended a forum where Robert Garriot of NCSoft spoke on the issue of digital distribution, and he said that his company found that his U.S. customers overwhelmingingly preferred to purchase his company's MMO games at retail rather than download them from his company even though that choice was available to them.

Keep in mind that the combined size of all the patches for WoW probably exceeds 5 gigs

If all those patches were delivered all at once, and if users knew of the wait for them in advance of buying the game, more of them would probably be clamoring for an offline or retail available solution for those updates.

And those are inconvenient.

It's certainly not preventing sales of those XBOX 360 hard drives right now.

The whole point of a console is that you don't have to constantly upgrade it.

Plugging in an add-on hard drive to a console is no more of an upgrade than plugging in an extra controller like a racing wheel.

If full, AAA games were offered for download from Live!, people would have to buy multiple extra hard drives and they aren't cheap.

That's not preventing current XBOX Live users from downloading the original XBOX titles Microsoft offers through Live like Halo.

Considering that most 360 games are a full DVD9, that's only 15 games you can fit on the drive if you don't have anything else on there.

Microsoft and Sony will simply have to make larger drives available for their consoles. It's not an insurmountable problem as larger hard drives than 120GB certainly do exist. Plus, their download services could allow users to redownload games so that users wouldn't have to store their entire downloaded game library locally.

It's simply much easier and cheaper to just go out to the tore and buy the disc.

The same thing can be said of similar downloadable PC games which is why retail/physical sales still dominate.

Console gamers, on the other hand, are used to just popping in the disc and playing.

Current downloadable console games are already changing that expectation.

Instant gratification is key to the console's appeal.

That's pretty much the appeal of any popular consumer good these days.

With consoles, you can buy a game disc, play it and then sell it at GameStop for a partial refund. You can't do that with downloaded games.

I'm not saying that downloadable games will totally supplant the current way that console games are sold. However, I believe that it will become an available option just as it is currently for AAA PC games. It will no longer be a distinction between PC and console gaming.

This comment was edited on Mar 21, 02:45.