Leading product research Company GFK is set to tracking the sale of downloaded PC games.The service will start early in 2010 according to Company executives.
Speaking at last week’s London Games Conference,GfK Chart-Track Director Dorian Bloch called on publishers and distribution platform holders to offer data that would allow Gfk Chart-Track to compile the charts; he said that the digital download market is now big enough to support them.
Bloch also presented data suggesting that the PC games market is not in the steep decline that many have claimed through sales figures of retail-sourced boxed copies. In spite of the fact that retail sales had fallen from 13.0 million in 2006 to 6.6 million in 2009 (full year estimate), Bloch revealed that by Gfk Chart-Track estimates, digital downloads had risen from 0.8 million to 3.4 million in the same years. The PC market has fallen from a combined 13.8 million in 2006 to 10 million in 2009 (full year estimate), some way short of many doom-laden commentators’ predictions. In fact, the decline in sales of PC Games overall is slowing, when adding in the missing data on PC games as digital downloads.
