News - Digital distribution overtakes retail PC game sales

[will101]

Steam gets my vote. I own so many more games because they were on weekend deals than I would otherwise have allowed myself to buy. The average price I've paid can't be much more than £5 and I only buy A rated games.

For convenience and re-play opportunity I bought the entire GTA series recently for a pittance minus GTA IV even though I own a hard copy of GTA: San Andreas.

I do still buy hard copies if an online retailer is offering a better price than Steam. In fact, most of my big title purchases in the last 6 months have been via retailers: Bad Company 2, Mirrors Edge, fex. I've noticed Steam seems to reach a base price which is higher than online retailer's and decent Steam offers have been a little thin on the ground recently for big name titles.

[Percy1983]

As much as I can see online activation being a problem in the future, there is always patches out there to get round these things, right now they are not needed for most of us but when a game stops online activation surely they could post an official work around.

[Iron Sights]

not surprising really about dd games selling well. I like steam for the reasons that people have already mentioned, sure there is a risk, but steam seems to be a strong market leader and are well positioned. I personally dont think steam will go bust just like GOG.com (good old games) did.

http://kotaku.com/5642141/what-happe...good-old-games

[latrosicarius]

Nevertheless, I'm not surprised that digital distribution has overtaken physical, and sadly, from my perspective anyway, it's probably a trend set to continue.

You should be happy about the increasing digital distribution trend as it will make boxed games more and more irrelevant and therefore cheaper to purchase.

A few months after release, stores will realize that their boxes aren't selling fast enough due to online competition, want to clear their shelves, and will put them on sale.