I Doubt Most People Prefer Buying Games Digitally

Statistics can lie, and I believe I found another example of that.

Hey everyone, Happy Gamer here. I read an article recently about Nintendo possibly releasing the NX without a disc drive as shown by some preliminary patents. You can read it here. First off, I hate the idea of a console without physical media since I love having my games on my shelf. Second, I think it just wasn't put in the preliminary patent because every console has like 20 patents alone (but it is fun to hear people speculate about how Nintendo is going back to cartridges or going the way of SD cards).

But here's the big kicker. The article says "most gamers now prefer to buy the game digitally." That I find hard to believe. From my experience, most console gamers still prefer physical. People are still buying physical games. I know I still prefer physical. Pretty much all my friends prefer physical. I still see loads of physical games being sold at retailers. I still always see people at gamestop and in the game section of stores. Physical is still very alive and relevant.

However, I believe that the statistic "a majority of games are bought digitally" is TECHNICALLY correct, and here's why. There are 3 types of games that are predominantly bought digitally, steam sale games (and PC games in general), indie games, and PSN free/discount games.

Steam has all but eliminated physical games on PC. They made it very convenient to just download the games, and made physical PC games very INconvenient. Then you have steam sales where people buy loads of games for ultra cheap, but only available digitally. If someone want's super cheap steam games, they need to buy digitally. If they want a PC game in general, they typically need to buy digitally.

Then you have indie games. Indie games are really taking off. For those of you who don't know, an indie game is a game developed by a small development team or individual, or otherwise not made by a big studio. They typically don't have the resources to release the game physically, so to get it on PC, PS3, PS4, XBOX360, XBOX ONE, and Wii U, they are released digitally. Aside from the indiebox subscription box, I don't really know of indie games being sold physically, so the only way to enjoy them is digitally.

Lastly, you have the free and discounted games available through PS+. This is probably accounting for the digital console games. With PS+, you get steam sale level discounts and even more games for free. While some of these games are released physically, the only way to get them for free or heavily discounted is to get them digitally.

So lets say that 60% of games are bought digitally now. Well, I'm going to estimate that half of those digital sales are PC games where digital is easier and almost always cheaper than physical. Then I'm going to estimate that 20% of those digital sales are for indie games that are not available physically. I'm also going to estimate that another 20% of the digital games are PSN deals that you can only get from digital. The remaining 10% are games that have a physical release and the digital price is the same as physical and people just preferred to buy them digitally. If my made up numbers are correct, that means that of all the games sold, only 6% are people just preferring digital over physical with all other aspects being equal, whereas 40% of people are buying physical over digital all other things equal. I don't have anything but trends of what I see in people saying their preferences are, but I'm guessing that these are rather accurate, otherwise people wouldn't have cared about XBOX ONE DRM.

Well, this has been Happy Gamer, signing off, and you need to think about where the statistics are coming from.