Hooray for data! An upcoming report from NPD Group reveals stats for an important category that the firm hasn’t tracked until now: sales of videogames outside of new game purchases from brick-and-mortar stores. That category includes purchase sources such as downloadable, used, subscription-based, mobile, social networks and game rentals.
NPD’s soon-to-be-released report, Games Industry: Total Consumer Spend, reveals that U.S. consumers spent approximately$2.6 to $2.9 billion on this “non-traditional” category in the first half of this year. That’s in addition to the $3.7 billion spent by U.S. consumers on new physical videogames in the same period. NPD analyst Anita Frazier used the findings as a way to highlight the firm’s added research coverage.
“While the new physical retail channel still generates the majority of industry sales, our expanded research coverage allows us to assess the total consumer spend across the growing number of ways to acquire and experience gaming, including social networks.”
This is an important report for NPD given the flak it often gets for its omission of purchase data from new channels.
