News Survey: 47 percent of PC game sales are digital

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2009/01/30/survey-47-percent-of-pc-sales-are-digital/1

A survey run by RPS indicates that nearly half of all PC games sales are made digitally through services like Steam.

 

Steam's DRM is so transparent to the user who would go buy a disc thats going to hold your family hostage if you attempt to put it in your other computer?

Another thing for ISPs to complain about having to actually fulfill the contracts they sell people too...

 

2000 'hardcore' gamers is hardly indicative of the whole PC gaming population though is it? Although I do have Steam, I only get games off there that are:

1) Steam-only
2) Ridiculously cheap on special offer

Otherwise it's boxed copy all the time.... That way it's yours forever! (Unless it requires online activation a la EA - but I avoid those like the plague)

 

I haven't purchased a hard copy of a PC game since they got rid of the awesome black boxes that they used to come in, with the cardboard sleeve.

 

It may not be the ideal set for a survey, but it IS necessarily better than things like the NPD study.

 

I do know what you mean, but bad statistics is not the best way to counter other bad statistics. If someone was able to actually produce credible and comprehensive figures, people would quote those and so ignore NPD's numbers entirely... As it is, anyone looking to quote some gaming stats probably won't be quoting this instead

 

There is work afoot to try to gather sales information on Digital Downloads, but (unsurprisingly) a lot of the retailers are extremely cagey about releasing their figures to anybody.

 

I am a bit suspicious of Valve and their reluctance to publish Steam sales figure. Primarily I think this is because Steam is a massive revenue generator for them and the margins are substantial. If they were to release some hard data to this effect, competitors might target them more aggressively with rival distribution platforms.

 

Oh Steam... how we love you so.


Or did.


Their prices seem consistently out of whack these days.. Take the new Dawn of War 2 for example. It's £35 online via Steam and only £25 from amazon or play. Thats £10 less plus you get the physical media and manuals !!


So Steam can kiss my A** ! Daylight robbery when you think about it (they pay no commission to any 3rd parties like GAME etc for online sales).

 

My only trouble with digital distribution is ISP's bandwidth throttling. I buy games over Steam, but am worried the BTinternet is throttling my connection for it.

 

Prices on steam are defined by the publisher that owns the game, not by valve (with the exception of valve's own games of course) and quite a few of them have strict rules/contracts that say online distribution must cost more than the same in a physical store, so as not to annoy the shops too much. It's very silly, but that's how it is.

 

I cant purchase games via online stores, my bandwidth allotment of only 5gb a month prohibits that. I still need a retail packaged copy of a game.. thats why I get my games in box from Newegg.com when I order PC parts!

 

I'd rather have a boxed copy any day.

 

I don't download any games, mainly because my broadband speed is so pathetic coupled with intermitent power blips that any lengthy download ends up being an exercise in frustration. So I'll stick to the old fashioned way thanks.

 

I buy most of my games on Steam now tbh. I suspect Steam will be around long after i need to worry about owning a physical copy of a particular game. For the 3rd party titles, i generally won't buy anything that is more than £29.99 on Steam (which is normally just the EA related titles). Their January sale had some excellent bargains too. I also like the ability to just backup the entire Steam folder when getting a new hard drive or doing a windows reinstall and then copying the folder back, without any invasive DRM telling you that you're now running the software on a different PC. Compare that with a digital distribution copy of Crysis that i bought from EA's online store that now advises me that my licence to play it has expired, and despite several attempts at re-downloading, reinstalling and several e-mails to the support desk, still doesn't work (the last e-mail helpfully suggested that i uninstall the download manager....)

 

I buy about 80% of my games via steam, mostly on sale and because it's just so easy to get all my games onto a new hdd or computer, just download the client and tell it what to download (no bandwidth throttling here yet ).

But if I see a better deal somewhere else, of course I'll go for physical media.

 

as a hardcore gamer I have bought a grand total of 0 games on steam, I'd just rather have a physical copy for when the situation arises.

 

I'm much rather have a hard copy than a game via steam


+ my internet is so slow (I'm embarrassed to tell you what I have )

 

So what about all the other purchases on websites like play, gameplay, amazon, shopto etc....

Play is where I buy 90% of my games. Are they counting these sites too?

 

Monthly bandwidth restrictions suck. I am fortunate to have an unlimited wireless plan at a reasonable cost. Heck, just in the last hour and a half since my most recent connection I've downloaded over 350 megabytes, mostly trying to patch a game. I would burn through a 5 Gig restriction in less than a week with the amount of online TV episodes I watch.

Beats the hell out of dial up though. Was using a 56K modem up until about 6 weeks ago.

EDIT: 350 megabytes in that time frame was not one sustained download. I picked up a copy of Neverwinter Nights2 today and apparently the patches are incremental. Dowload a patch, then install. Download the next patch, then install. Been through 5 or 6 iterations of this so far.