I’m tired of reading about how the PC industry is in a slump. It’s not. All of the reports from NPD and other sources are showing a slowdown in PC game sales. If you go to any retailer, you see shrinking shelf space for PC games. It’s doom and gloom. The sky is falling.

Guess what – they’re all wrong.

They’re wrong because they don’t have the data on the explosive growth of digital downloads of games. We do roughly 75% of our sales of our expansion packs digitally. None of those sales ever get recorded in NPD or by any other source.

Valve does an absolutely massive business in it as well (I was on a panel with Gabe a few months back where he said publicly that over half their revenue from Half-Life 2 was through Steam).

EA is now doing digital sales through its new downloader (I’m a big BF2 player and I love the convienence). Direct2Drive is doing great business (I recently bought Civ IV on it and I love being able to load it up on a laptop without having to worry about a CD).

The other factor that looms large in this supposed “slump” is the simple fact that a lot of people are now playing MMOs. In the U.S. the number of MMO gamers is easily over 2.5 million people now. Many of those gamers would regularly purchase a lot of PC games in stores. Instead, they are paying subscription fees and spending an increasing amount of time (over 20 hours per week) playing MMOs, leaving little time for other games.

These analysts need to look a lot deeper before heralding the doom of PC gaming. It’s growing in a huge way… they just need to figure out how to measure this growth properly. On a positive note, I recently read that NPD (which puts out great data btw) is revising its definition of PC sales to include online revenue. This is a great first step, and I think you’re going to see that not only is the PC gaming world alive and well, but it’s a whole lot larger than people think!

Smed