North American Gamers Spent Less on Retail Games than Other Business Model

The NPD Group, which tracks video game and hardware sales for the United States market, has announced that during the third quarter of 2011 gamers have spent more money on what it calls non-traditional business models than on packages that are sold at retail.

The retail market has managed to reach a value of sold goods of 1.3 billion dollars (991.3 million Euro) for the third quarter .

The amount of money spent on used games, subscriptions, rentals, social network games, digital downloads, downloadable add-ons and mobile games reached 1.64 billion dollars (1.25 billion Euro).

The shift is a good example of how the future of gaming might look, with players spending more of their time and their money on free to play and subscription titles and less shopping for big packages at their preferred store.

The overall value of the industry for the quarter was 4.2 billion dollars (3.2 billion Euro) which is a decrease of about 11 percent over the same period of 2010.