NPD now tracks PC game digital downloads, finds that they make up nearly 50 percent of all sales

You understand how every month you notice stories like “Red Dead Redemption sells X copies, Super Mario Galaxy 2 sells Y copies,” etc? All of that data comes from the NPD Group, which tracks retail sales. What NPD never used to track was digital download sales-Steam etc. That\’s why\’d you spot doom-and-gloom stories like, “PC game sales fall 50 percent last month.” Yeah, because NPD was never keeping tabs on the digital sales! That\’s like saying Apple is in trouble because nobody is buying iTunes music at Best Buy. Rubbish, exactly.

Surely you will see where that’s going.

NPD now, indeed, tracks digital sales, and found that a whopping 48 percent of all PC game sales come from digital downloads. In other words, NPD was missing nearly half of all sales once you saw those doom-and-gloom stories.

The Big Five digital distribution sites are:

1. Steam
2. Direct2Drive
3. Blizzard.com
4. EA.com
5. Worldofwarcraft.com

You must also note that that list only includes games commonly found at retail. It also doesn\’t include all those silly Facebook-type games people play. I don\’t, and never will, consider that “gaming.” You possibly can in addition be double-clicking into empty space with some of those things.

Bottom line: approximately half of all PC games sales come digitally at the moment. That\’s fairly remarkable.