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Online Games to Make up a Third of All Game Sales by 2011
GameDaily reports on analyst research indicating that online games will be a huge part of the games market in a few years. The online portion of games sales hit roughly $3.8 billion in 2006, and is expected to grow at a rapid rate in the next few years, with Massively Multiplayer Online Games leading the way. By 2011 analysts expect that number to hit $11.8 billion, which would be about a third of all game sales. "'The main driver for sustained growth in the online games market will be the continued uptake of broadband services around the world,' said David Mercer, Principal Analyst at Strategy Analytics. 'Additionally, the very lucrative revenue opportunity in both the massively multiplayer segment and the electronic sell through market will continue to attract new entrants into the online games market.' While digital distribution is making more and more full games available for download for PC gamers (through services such as Steam, Direct2Drive, etc.), console makers have been much slower to offer entire games for download - although Sony is starting to do this on its PlayStation Network, with Warhawk being a primary example since it's available for download or on Blu-ray disc."
Funny, I'd have thought legitimate emulators such as the XBox Live Arcade and The Nintendo Wii's Virtual Console would at least be part of this increase in sales. Once broadband gets better by 2011, I think we'll definitely see an increase in games purchased online, and that might be a good amount of this "one third of all game sales" these researchers are anticipating.