Marketers have to adapt as half of all console game sales go digital

Posted byby Dean Takahashi
April 22, 2014
Updated June 18, 2025
2 min

By 2018, about 50 percent of console game sales will be sold via digital downloads, according to a forecast by market research firm EEDAR. And that will have a lot of consequences for how they are marketed in the future, said Greg Short, chairman of EEDAR, in an interview with GamesBeat.

In 2014, the digital share of console game sales is less than 20 percent. But downloads are growing much faster than physical store sales. That means marketers will have to change how they promote to keep pace with where the gamers are engaging with the products, Short said.

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Written by

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.