Analyst Doug Creutz of Cowen and Company has said that up to 25 percent of PlayStation 4 and Xbox One sales are digital. When the NPD Group reported declining software sales for the month of October 2014, Creutz said that the results can be attributed to a significant number of purchases being made digitally since NPD only tracks new sales for physical games at U.S. retailers.
[Sales were down] driven by a tough comparison to last year and the drag from a significant percentage of next-gen software units being sold digitally. This is not so much a problem for the publishers as it is for brick-and-mortar retail.
Given the strong shift toward new-gen games that is apparent from recent data, and the fact that digital currently appears to be taking as much as 25 percent share of total new-gen sales depending on the game, we continue to expect total Q4 physical unit sales to be down double-digits year-over-year.
In related news, industry intelligence firm, SuperData Research, has said that one in five Destiny copies are digital. CEO Joost van Dreunen said that the Bungie title published by Activision sold “roughly twenty percent of full game downloads on consoles.”
Do any of our readers prefer digital copies over physical?
[Source: VentureBeat (1), (2)]
