NPD Group: Pure Digital Content Valued at 5.8 Billion in 2010

The NPD Group, which has launched yet another sales evaluation for the game industry in the United States for the month of March, has also released a new estimate about the whole of 2010, showing that that gamers have spent no less than 5.8 billion dollars on purely digital video games content.

During the entire year, the spending on content which was launched through more traditional retail chains reached 10.1 billion dollars, down more than 5 percent over the same period in 2009.

Games and experiences that are only available in digital form, on the PC, the home consoles and the handheld devices, made up about 36% of the video games market value in 2010 according to estimations from the NPD Group, showing just how important virtual only experiences have become.

The company has far less reliable numbers for 2009, but it estimates that growth for the sector has been of about 23 percent.

At the moment, the NPD Group does not track digital only sales in order to include them in their monthly publicly launched data packages, but the company has recently said that it plans to add them in the coming future.

The NPD Group has bought a company called In-Stat and has also apparently contacted services like Steam, which is pretty secretive about its sales data, in order to see how their contribution to the video game industry can be estimated.

After the release of the NPD data for February 2010, a representative from major publisher Electronic Arts stated that the information was not representative in any way of the industry because of its lack of interest for digital-only channels.

Electronic Arts is one of the companies that is most interested in the new digital only space, launching a number of titles on social networks with free to play and micro transaction models.