PC Game Downloads: Roughly half of all game sales

Gamasutra, a gaming body, has released an article that details the Top 5 major sellers for games that are buy online, download online, following the media-less principle. The NPD group claims that US digital download purchases reached 21.3 million in 2009, which is roughly 48% of the total game sales for that year. However, retail game sales slumped 23% in 2009 due to the increase of digital download purchases.

Many game producers, such as Valve (with the Steam PC Gaming Platform) and Blizzard are raking in the cash, as gamers buy new maps and downloadable content for Team Fortress 2, Half-Life and other best-seller games. Facebook is also proving to be a money mine, as gamers can buy virtual cash in Facebook game applications like Mafia Wars and FarmVille to unlock new and exciting features.

The iPhone and iPod Touch platforms for gaming have also increased by 30% within Quarter 2 and Quarter 4 of 2009,  with 97% of people who are happy with the free version of the game buying the full version from the Apple App Store. Sadly, there is no mention of Android-powered phones as a gaming platform, which may suggest that it’s a slightly biased review, unless Google’s new gaming platform may yield good results for Android devices, with Zynga agreeing to port versions of FarmVille and other Zynga-made games over to the Google Gaming platform.

As quoted from the article:

Top 5 Frontline Digital Retailers –2009 (based on unit % share)
1. Steampowered.com
2. Direct2drive.com
3. Blizzard.com
4. EA.com
5. Worldofwarcraft.com

It is quite evident that Steam is the most popular online game store, mainly thanks to it’s relaxed-look UI and one-click Buy and Download feature. In the gaming console sales world, Nintendo is spearheading the competition with it’s much-acclaimed Nintendo 3DS console, DSiWare and Wii Games while Microsoft and Sony trail behind  for the first half of 2010.

Article Sources: Gamasutra & Sankaku Complex.