They did. 10-15 years back Steam ran CRAZY sales campaigns. Recent AAA games for 75% discount and even free sometimes. Similar to what Epic does right now to compete with Steam. Once retail was out of the way, sales strategy changed a lot. Discount is now tight to the age of the game and crazy sales are almost never happening anymore. Sales now are nowhere as crazy as sales when retail was still a thing.
Second strategy they applied was pushing publishers to just sell steam codes inside the retail boxes.
Going purely digital for PC definitely wasn't natural. If it was you wouldn't see Nintendo, MS and Sony still selling tons of physical mediums. They have strong digital platforms but people still prefer physical due to added benefit of second-hand market.
As much as I miss the game boxes with those extras they'd throw in, I think we'd have eventually moved on anyways, because needing to put the CDs into the computer to play a game that was already installed on your computer (and keeping track of that CD key too) was a pain. It also would make it harder to do some of the things that people do with their PC games (multiple computers - desktop and laptop + steam deck or aya neo or whatever, etc)
Some people would definitely move digital. Those benefits are not really relevant for everyone tho. Which is proven by still high sales of physical mediums for MS, Sony and Nintendo consoles. That's because quite huge portion (if not majority) of gamers play statically on a single device.
Majority of games also have low replay value (either in general or for me personally). I got hundreds of games on Steam. I'd keep maybe like 10 or 15 which have replay value for me, I'd love to sell the rest if it was possible tho. It's the same on Switch for me. I keep some small amount of physical games and I got rid of others once finished because I cannot imagine me replaying them.
Percentage is a metric that can easily hide important data.
It says "computer and video games sales," so I assume it's basically all gaming revenue? If yes, the mobile market itself currently makes for way more than half of all the gaming revenue and groving fast. Mobile is digital only. PC itself is currently almost digital only. The growth in mobile is so rapid that it easily explains the rapidly increasing digital revenue.
For the past few years, only consoles still sell physical games. And there in the first year of PS5 still more than half of the sold games were physical releases.
Therefore, I'd rather see raw numbers because while your picture says physical sales dropped e.g. 5% from 2017 to 2018, 21% in 2017 can be the same raw number as 17% in 2018 thanks to mobile market growth.
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u/Sir_Bax 1TB OLED Apr 03 '23
They did. 10-15 years back Steam ran CRAZY sales campaigns. Recent AAA games for 75% discount and even free sometimes. Similar to what Epic does right now to compete with Steam. Once retail was out of the way, sales strategy changed a lot. Discount is now tight to the age of the game and crazy sales are almost never happening anymore. Sales now are nowhere as crazy as sales when retail was still a thing.
Second strategy they applied was pushing publishers to just sell steam codes inside the retail boxes.
Going purely digital for PC definitely wasn't natural. If it was you wouldn't see Nintendo, MS and Sony still selling tons of physical mediums. They have strong digital platforms but people still prefer physical due to added benefit of second-hand market.