For a long time, players and videogame creators have thought of videogames distributed only digitally, with no boxed retail disc, as a nice side show but not popular enough to generate the sales and the profits that big publishers are looking for.

But if the figures cited by a representative of Microsoft Australia are to be believed, the gap might be disappearing, with titles from Xbox Live now practically able to top the overall videogame sales charts, if they were included in them.

Australia recently experienced the Winter of Arcade, known in the northern hemisphere as the Summer, during which Microsoft put out premium Xbox Live games that attracted quite a lot of attention. And a Microsoft man told Kotaku Australia that all of the five games released, amongst them Shadow Complex, which reached 200,000 downloads in just one week, would have entered the top 10 chart across all formats and would have topped the dedicated Xbox 360 one.

He went further to say that other titles, somewhat older, like the XBLA version of Worms 2 and the Battlefield 1942 multiplayer shooter, would have even reached number one on the all format chart in the first week on sale, beating known games like Wii Fit. The comparison is made taking into account only unit sales. The revenue brought in by games like Worms and Shadow Complex is limited by their price, which is significantly lower than that of retail releases.

This is impressive news, even when taking into account the fact that Australia might be a special case when it comes to digital distribution, Xbox Live and retail releases. With more and more quality games coming to the PlayStation Network, WiiWare and Xbox Live and with most PC releases also quickly coming to Steam, Impulse or Direct2Drive, we could just be on the brink of a digital distribution revolution.