New Physical Video Game Sales Make Up Less Than 50% of American Market

According to figures released by the NPD Group, $14.80 billion was spent on video games in 2012, with physical sales accounting for less than 50% of the total.

Overall, the video games market saw a decline  of 9%, falling from $16.34 billion in 2011 to $14.80 in 2012. Physical sales saw the biggest drop, falling from $11.25 billion in 2011, to $8.88 billion in 2012.

Sales of digital game content however climbed by 16% to $5.92billion. Digital content includes full games, add-on  content, social networks, mobile games and subscriptions.

Total sales of used and rented physical games was $1.7billion.

Liam Callahan, an industry analyst  at The NPD Group commented “When including all other forms of content spending outside of new physical  games, the 2012 U.S. games market was more than twice as large as the total  spending on new physical games alone”. “There were divergent trends when looking at content spending in 2012 as a  whole, with a decrease of 21 percent in spending on physical content while  digital content spending grew 16 percent; both formats combined for