We’ve used the Easter break not only to collect eggs and visit our beloved. No, we actually worked too:)
As with our Top 20 Download Charts here is another attempt to better understand and quantify the games download market. So far there have been some vague numbers and discussions with regard to how the different download shops are doing.
The only hard facts I could find date back to November 09. In its customer report Stardock (operator of the Impulse online store) estimated that Steam operates as some sort of monopoly with 70% market share of the digital distribution business. Impulse follows with 10% while all others fight for the remaining 20%.
I found that quite intriguing. Not only that Steam has built such a strong market position but that there would be so few competition. So we decided to do some research on our own.
Method and Limitations
Since we aggregate deals from all major digital distribution platform we somewhat know the market and its main players. Since real sales data from are (yet) hard to come by we needed a different metric. We went for unique visitor as the core metric, asuming that the more people visit a store the more people buy at that store. This obviously is not perfect since we don’t know how well the indivdual shops convert visitors to actual sales. Another limitation may be that some platforms (like Steam or Impulse) don’t require their users to go to the website to purchase. Users can also use the desktop client to access the shop. Further, all traffic data itself are estimated and therefore present another imprecision. For the final analysis we used www.compete.com, which seems to be a bit US focused and thereby propably bringing in further imbalance for non-US stores. I compared all results against analysis with Google’s Adplanner and Trafficestimate. While there are some differences (between 2-5%) the overall picture doesn’t change.Finally, I estimated all shops that are not on the list with a conservative guess of 10%.
Our Findings
- Yes, Steam clearly seems to dominate the digital distribution market of PC games with 52%
- Second comes Direct2Drive with 17% followed by, suprise, Gametap with 9%.
- Also interesting is, that GOG.com with its Oldies but Goldies portfolio seems to attract quite an audience with 5%.
- Further down the road we find GamersGate, Gamesplanet and Impulse with 2-3% each.
These results obviously do not fully reflect the few currently available data (see Stardock). As discussed earlier, all data are based on estimations and a number of assumptions so they are prone to error. However, we see them more as a starting point for further analysis and hopefully a critical discussion.
Also, I’d very much like to hear your own interpretation of this market structure.
Scott
/ April 8, 2010From a person with a lot of experience in this area. Rough (non-steam) percentages are basically right, D2D sits comfortably in the #2 spot. GOG looks higher than reality. Gamesplanet and Gametap should be combined, same company. Though for Gametap using website visitors is probably incorrect since the majority of their users are subscription users (more reasons to go back without a full game purchase). Gamestop (which is actually TryMedia/Real) looks a little low because you’re not counting Gamesload and Yahoo games that they also both power. Not sure how you get 8% on the “other” since the combined others would be more like 1%. And finally for a core game title released on all of those platforms, Steam is at minimum 70% probably higher. Increase that and take the resulting shares and you’re fairly close.
There you go.
Sebastian
/ April 8, 2010Hi Scott, thanks for sharing this. “Ohter” is a pretty rought guess, it’s probably much lower, true. Are you sure about Gametap and Gamesplanet? The latter seems to be powered by the French Metaboli? Anyway, I’ll include this into the next update.
Ulysses Mockett
/ April 10, 2010These are interesting numbers and it’s definitely something we can use, particularly with our DRM Evaluating Regimen purely for the purposes of determining which Digital Distribution Platforms are “End User Friendly” and which aren’t. It’s something we definitely need to look into, especially in the coming weeks and months. In any case, it’s good to have sites like this to keep track of what’s going on in the PC Gaming Market.
scott
/ April 10, 2010Yes positive: http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/20387/Metaboli_Acquires_GameTap_Creating_Global_Gaming_Service.php
Sebastian
/ April 11, 2010We started to include some basic information not just on DRM but also on potential privacy issues that some desktop clients like Steam’s may pose to the gamer. It is not entirely clear how many information are transmitted to Valve.
Sebastian
/ April 11, 2010Scott, do you have by any chance information on how well Amazon is doing with regard to download games? I’d also really like to know how well their PSN and XBLA gaming codes are selling.
Scott
/ April 17, 2010Well, easy answer is look at the content, hasn’t been a big rush of new stuff there right? Given Amazon’s sucess in other forms of digital content, I would look at this more as a proof of concept setting the stage for something larger but not a success on its own.