Hard stats on downloads and subs
(Visited 4745 times) Game talk
May 242006
NPD apparently just finished a report. The notable figures gleaned from CNET ‘s article:
- PC video games are at $1.4 billion in revenue.
- Of that, online (subs plus digital downloads and web games) accounts for $334m. That’s 24%.
- Subscriptions specifically account for the lion’s share of that, $292m. That’s 21%.
- They claim 1.4 million subscribers for this segment, which has to be a U.S. domestic-only figure. NPD traditionally underrepresents, and in this case I would believe it: WoW + SOE has got to reach that number by themselves. I wonder if NPD tried to account for multiple account holders.
- Casual games sites account for $52m in revenue.
- There’s 1.05m people paying for casual games sites.
- Digital downloads, by which I assume they mean digital distribution specifically, seems to be around 3%, or around $42m.
6 Responses to “Hard stats on downloads and subs”
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According to the same NPD Group via the 2006 Essential Facts compiled by the ESA, computer game sales were 0.953 billion USD in 2005. I wonder whose data is incorrect…
[…] Comments […]
When in the world are these people going to start looking at the rest of the world? From the numbers I have seen, Korean gaming is between US$1B and US$2B, Chinese gaming probably over US$500M (I saw a recent estimate for China’s gaming market for 2006 of US$760M), not to mention Europe, and everyone else.
And, just like you, I’m guessing that they are undercounting the US, non-boxed market. Downloads should be countable, one day, but microtransactions and secondard markets are going to be tricky to measure.
The game industry statistics are becoming like citing car sales from the “Big 3” in the US as the whole market.
Well, to be fair, NPD can’t look at the rest of the world. And there IS value in domestic stats.
According to thier web site they use an annual sample of 2000 gamers they survey, then weight it. this is coupled with a lot of “market research (aka Internet surfing and picking up stats)I imagine.
They dont have a valid sample size, thus thier estimates are too conservative. I would also argue that this is hardly “actionable” data” upon which developers and management can make valid decisions in the best interests of thier consumers- people who love games. At best thier data can give you “impressions” of what a trend line might look like. Also its imperative to understand that data is only as good as its source, and only as good as the tools you have to mine it with.
They are likey better at letting companies know if thier consumers play video games and like Nike’s though, from the looks of thier site they are primarily a market research firm, which should always be differantiated from a company that provides Decision Support Systems (data mining)
What I mean here is sometimes its valid to know if your consumer base likes Nike, drinks Mountain Dew and drives a Jetta, but you should not rely on the same company to provide data about multiple scripts, multiplayer households, how they pay for thier accounts and what type of connectivity they have, because they probably dont have those basic data points much less even more detailed data. And they more than likey do not have the tools or build the systems to help companies mine this data.
“When in the world are these people going to start looking at the rest of the world? From the numbers I have seen, Korean gaming is between US$1B and US$2B, Chinese gaming probably over US$500M (I saw a recent estimate for China’s gaming market for 2006 of US$760M), not to mention Europe, and everyone else.”-Steven
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Allen
While info on the US market is certainly important, from an industry perspective it is what 20-30% of the total PC gaming market. If US companies are going to compete globally, they have to know what they are up against or, conversely, rather than yet another article on “Why PC Gaming Is Dead”, the numbers would show that it is alive and well… and that there is a ton of opportunity for companies looking beyond just the US. And these numbers don’t even show the level of participation for a lot of casual games which have only conversion rates of 1-3%, but reach many millions of customers (both in the US and abroad) – information that could also open up additional business models.