For anyone who thinks the video game industry is dying, Australian sales tell a different story, as they saw a 15 percent rise over 2015 towards $2.83 billion AUD.
According to figures from a group advocating for the Australian and New Zealand business of video games, the Interactive Games & Entertainment Association (IGEA), digital sales led the way with a 27 percent growth. The figures incorporated digital and physical sales, game subscriptions, and any associated hardware, including all mobile sales.
Bringing in $1.589 billion AUD alone, sales across platforms such as Steam and the Xbox Marketplace continue to accelerate faster than physical sales, which only increased by 2 percent.
The CEO of the IGEA, Ron Curry, said that the transition between the old and the new generations of consoles is a major contributor to this growth in sales. "The current generation of consoles have been adopted rapidly by Australians, highlighting that gaming culture has become well and truly mainstream in the intervening years. This has had a flow on effect to the increased sale of both packaged games and digital content."
He said that physical copies continued to be purchased for a gift or a personal collection. Regardless, the popularity of digital gaming is undeniable, with findings from data aggregator Superdata Research showing $US61 billion USD in global sales. Sales in hard copies of PC games was the only market to decline, as services like Steam and Humble Bundle begin to take over.
Source: IGEA via PC & Tech Authority | Image: TK Kurikawa/Shutterstock