A third of current gen EA games sold last year were digital downloads

EA had its Q4 earnings call last night, wrapping up its financial year for 2017, and revealed that 33% of unit sales for the current generation of consoles were downloads.

That is, EA said, ‘considerably ahead of the 29% we had forecast and up 9 percentage points year on year.’ While physical copies are still the majority of sales, EA is clearly keeping an eye on what it terms ‘the continuing evolution of consumer behaviour’, i.e. more and more of us are just downloading games, possibly because we can’t be arsed waiting for deliveries or leaving the house. 

EA expects that downloads will continue to grow, currently estimating it at about 5% (so expecting a total of around 38% next year). EA was also pleased with the growth of EA Access and Origin Access.

As the digital market continues to grow, services like Xbox’s Game Pass, a kind of Netflix-style digital game rental model, might become the norm. 

This is, however, rack all use to people like my friend Jimmy, who lives somewhere with no internet connection and periodically drives to a friend’s house to download all the game updates he needs in one go.