NPD

Take-Two: Expect digital game sales to grow

Take-Two Interactive expects digital game sales to grow at a rapid clip, the company's CEO said in an interview yesterday.

Speaking to Bloomberg Television, Take-Two CEO Strauss Zelnick predicts that overall digital game sales will account for up to 40 percent of the company's business within the next three years.

"I think you can see digital distribution to be 20, 30, 40 percent of our business," Zelnick told Bloomberg Television. "However, I believe our business is going to grow, so I don't think it actually takes a bite out of retail, and I doubt … Read more

NPD puts some gaming sales data behind pay wall

It appears that the market researchers at The NPD Group are changing the way they distribute gaming sales data such that it is more profitable.

Starting this week, with its September release, NPD's free monthly gaming reports will no longer include the following:

Hardware unit sales Software unit sales Individual versions of a title in its bestselling-games list

Instead, the reports will list the top-selling games of the month by title, with all versions of the game included in a single listing. The new reports will also include a statement saying the retail information it collected for the month … Read more

Report: Tech spending to be down for the holidays

Most consumers plan to spend the same amount of money in the upcoming holiday shopping season as they did last year, and they plan to buy fewer games and electronics this year, NPD found in its annual holiday survey.

Some 61 percent of consumers say they will spend about the same amount of money this year as they did during the last holiday shopping season. Just 9 percent of respondents said they would spend more than last year. And 30 percent said they plan to spend less. By comparison, in 2009, 11 percent of respondents said that they planned to … Read more

NPD: Few Americans are consuming digital media

Connected devices are still having trouble finding a mass audience, a new report from market-research firm The NPD Group has found. But that is likely to change over time.

According to NPD, a whopping 75 percent of all U.S. consumers did not connect to or download multimedia content, including games, music, video, or e-books, over the past three months. The majority of consumers who did search for and download such content--15 percent--did so mostly on their PC or Mac as opposed to other types of connected devices, such as video game consoles, mobile devices, or Blu-ray players.

Unfortunately for … Read more

Digital game downloads beat retail store sales

People are buying more PC games online these days than they are in retail stores, according to a new report.

During the first six months of the year, consumers in the U.S. purchased and downloaded 11.2 million digital PC games online, surpassing the 8.2 million physical games bought at retail stores over the same period, according to an NPD Group report released today.

Though digital downloads accounted for most of the number of games sold from January to June, they accounted for just 43 percent of overall game revenue. But that difference stems mainly from the higher … Read more

Study: Music, not apps, rules iTunes

Software apps, which enable iPhone and iPod Touch users to do everything from play games to keep track of their weight, continue to grow in popularity. But music is "still central to the iTunes experience," according to a new survey from market researcher NPD Group.

In contrast with years past, NPD said Tuesday, "when every dollar spent at iTunes was on music and video," apps now vie for a chunk of that cash.

NPD said that an online survey in May of more than 3,800 members of the company's Web panel showed that all … Read more

Study: 56 million have played social-network game

Are social networks the new playing field for gamers? A new study from NPD Group is pointing that way.

Released Monday, NPD's July "Social Network Gaming" report found that 20 percent of those ages 6 and older said they've played a game on a social networking site during the past three months. That number adds up to around 56.8 million people, which NPD says is a significant figure for a relatively new playing field.

Among those surveyed for the report, 35 percent were new to the world of gaming, never having played a game before … Read more

Android hits top spot in U.S. smartphone market

Android is now the leading smartphone operating system in the U.S. in market share, according to a report released Wednesday by NPD Group.

Following a slew of new smartphones released in the second quarter, the Android operating system accounted for 33 percent of all smartphones sold in the U.S. consumer market. That number pushed it ahead of Research In Motion with 28 percent and Apple with 22 percent. It also marked the first time since the fourth quarter of 2007 that RIM dropped to second place, said NPD.

Among the top five Android phones, the Motorola Droid was the best-selling handset in the quarter, followed by the HTC Droid Incredible, the HTC Evo 4G, the HTC Hero, and finally the HTC Droid Eris. Though Android's surge has helped it overtake RIM in market share, the Google OS-based phones still need to compete with heavy consumer demand for Apple's new iPhone 4.

"For the second consecutive quarter, Android handsets have shown strong but slowing sell-through market share gains [which measures the number of items sold against the number shipped] among U.S. consumers," Ross Rubin, executive director of industry analysis for NPD, said in a statement. "While the Google-developed OS took market share from RIM, Apple's iOS saw a small gain this quarter on the strength of the iPhone 4 launch."

RIM unveiled its new Torch phone with the BlackBerry 6 OS on Tuesday. But NPD sees the Torch's lack of large-screen allure as a negative compared with its bigger and similarly priced rivals Droid Incredible and Evo 4G.… Read more

More signs iPhone under Android attack

Add Nielsen to the growing list of research groups that say sales of Android phones are outpacing the iPhone's.

According to a report in the Los Angeles Times, research firm Nielsen has found that among those who bought a smartphone in the first half of the year, 27 percent acquired an Android phone while 23 percent bought an iPhone. Research in Motion and its BlackBerry phones beat both of them with 35 percent, the LA Times reported.

Nielsen's study appears to support similar findings from the NPD Group, which reported in May that Android had surpassed the iPhone … Read more