14 DAY TRIAL // A new report from the Entertainment Software Association shows that during the calendar year 2010 sales of video games on the United States market, the most important in the world, have slowed down and that digital distribution has increased its share of the market.
The documents titled “2011 Essential Facts About the Computer and Video Game Industry” says that overall game sales have gone from 16 billion dollars during 2009 to 15.9 billion during last year.
The figure combines revenue from retail sales and from digital distribution services and also includes things like: social games, mobile apps, subscriptions and other means to delivering video games to players.
The retail sector remains the most important for video games, but overall sales linked to it have gone down from 9.9 billion dollars to 9.4 billions from 2009 to 2010.
Other delivery methods were on the rise during the same period and the report says that digital video game sales now about 24 percent of the overall market, an increase of 4% when compared to 2009.
In 2010 players are also estimated by the ESA to have spent 6.29 billion dollars on video game related hardware with another 2.94 billion going towards accessories.
The rise of digital distribution platform can also be seen in the efforts of a number of companies to acquire their own digital outlet and expand the market.
Recently, the big specialist retail chain GameStop has acquired the Impulse platform, saying that it plans to make it a center piece of its future plans, apparently including the used games sales sector.
Direct2Drive was also recently bought by GameFly.
Publisher Electronic Arts has also announced that it plans to launch a digital content distribution platform called Origin, which will include significant social network elements.
The leader in the digital distribution field is Steam, created by Valve.