AUSTRALIAN VIDEO GAMES INDUSTRY WORTH NEARLY $3 BILLION LAST YEAR

2015 was a golden year for Australian video games sales, as digital overtakes retail.

If you bought a video game in 2015, congratulations! You’ve helped Australia’s video game industry reach its biggest year yet, to the tune of $2.83 billion worth of sales.

That’s another year of double digit growth, with sales increasing year on year by 15 per cent from 2014. The figures, released today by the Interactive Games & Entertainment Association, track sales of software (both physically bought and digital), game subscriptions, and hardware across all gaming devices, including mobile.

Digital has seen a huge increase, up 27 per cent to a massive $1.589 billion, outstripping bricks and mortar sales. They still rose, however, but only by two per cent.

“It has been another very strong year of growth for the Australian video games industry,” said Ron Curry, CEO of IGEA, in today’s release. “Digital sales continue to surge in Australia as consumers become increasingly comfortable purchasing downloaded versions and additional content of their favourite games. The current generation of consoles have been adopted rapidly by Australians, highlighting that gaming culture has become well and truly mainstream in the intervening years. This has had a flow on effect to the increased sale of both packaged games and digital content.”

The IGEA believes the increase in digital sales is in part due to rapid uptake of latest gen consoles (and console software sales were the best performing sector overall), but hardcopies are still very popular when it comes to buying as a gift, or for collecting purposes.

In fact, about the only segment to see a decrease is in hardcopy PC sales, where Steam and other digital platforms are having an ever increasing effect.