NPD Now Tracks PC Game Digital Downloads, Finds That They Make Up Nearly 50 Percent Of All Sales

You know how every month you see stories like “ Red Dead Redemption sells X copies, Super Mario Galaxy 2 sells Y copies,” etc? All of that data comes from the NPD Group, which tracks retail sales. What NPD never used to track was digital download sales—Steam and the like. That’s why’d you see doom-and-gloom stories like, “PC game sales fall 50 percent last month.” Yeah, because NPD was never keeping tabs on the digital sales! That’s like saying Apple is in trouble because nobody is buying iTunes music at Best Buy. Rubbish, exactly.