The NPD group (the American market research group that analyses pretty much everything you can think of) has released some fresh and rather surprising information on the amount of console gamers who make use of downloadable content across America.
For a country with the kind of connectivity that it has, the results might surprise you. The research, dubbed “The Connected Experience: Building a Bridge Between Device & Contentâ€, focused on many aspects of online distribution across many platforms, but we’re mainly interested in the DLC side of things.
As little as 6% of USA console users connected to and downloaded content during a three month period. That’s a lot lower than many gamers might have expected it to be. According to reports at Industry Gamers, 75% of USA consumers didn’t download or connect to online distribution platforms at all, meaning they own devices capable of digital distribution, but didn’t use the feature at all. PC and MAC downloadable content was only marginally better at 15% of users making use of the feature.
NPD puts this all down to the fact that the gaming market has drastically diversified over the last few years. As a result, the portion of the gamer-market that would use DLC has gotten smaller in the grander scheme of things.
I must admit: I haven’t made use of that much DLC in the past. Most of what I have downloaded has been bundled with special editions of games, like the Alan Wake DLC. That being said, I’ve downloaded the shit out of Guitar Hero and Rock Band music.
Source: Industry Games [via Destructoid]
Last Updated: September 29, 2010
Nick de Bruyne
September 29, 2010 at 15:47
I really like the idea of DLC but I think that too many publishers/developers have dropped the ball with regards to it. Too many DLC packs are barely worth any money at all and many of them are released way too late after a game is released.
These days a lot of guys play a game for 2-3 weeks at most then trade them off for the next best thing, and that doesn’t help when a company releases its first DLC 2 months down the line.
Also, for games that require you to still be in an active campaign to play the DLC, it doesn’t help when you have already played through the game and now have to either load into the middle of the game if you can to access it, or start over again.