Time is now NTEK LISTEN TO WHAT THEY ARE SAYING LO
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‘A bigger deal’
“It’s clear digital downloading is becoming a bigger deal,” said Michael Pachter, an analyst at Wedbush Securities.
The numbers were particularly striking because if game sales are ever going to grow, the time is now. The biggest games of the year have just landed on store shelves — including “Fallout 4,” “Call of Duty: Black Ops 3,” and “Star Wars: Battlefront” — and demand for them is running high among holiday gift buyers.
What is more, the industry is in the sweet spot of the hardware cycle, when the latest consoles from Sony and Microsoft are in plentiful supply, their prices have come down, and game publishers are cranking out titles that better exploit their capabilities.
Sony says its console sales have never been better. The company reported that it sold 30.2 million PlayStation 4s worldwide as of late November, just days after the second anniversary of the product. By comparison, it took around two years and two months for Sony to sell 30 million PlayStation 2s — the previous high-water mark for Sony in the game business.
One factor in NPD’s declining game sales is that the research firm does not include games that are bundled with consoles — an increasingly popular option for buying the machines — in its software sales data. But a much bigger reason is that it does not include digital downloads of games in its monthly tallies of the industry.