The Market for Virtual Goods and Downloadable Games in North America and Europe

In recent years, Asia has seen an explosion of consumers buying billions of dollars of downloadable goods and virtual items to enhance free to play games.  In the past few years, North America and Europe are starting to see similar trends as consumers start to become comfortable with downloading digital content. 

To understand how the movement to digital downloads and virtual goods are impacting the core game consumer, DFC Intelligence conducted a survey of nearly 5,000 gamers and partnered with Live Gamer to analyze seven years of virtual good transaction data from  games released in Korea, U.S. Germany, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam.

The result of this research is being presented in a detailed report which also includes access to Excel spreadsheets with survey data.

Part One Demographics and Methodology

• Source: The report is based on two major sources of primary research: 1) a survey of core consumers and 2) analysis of actual virtual goods transaction data from Live Gamer
• Survey Date: February 2010
• Consumers Surveyed: 4,816 in North America, U.K. and Europe
• Target Demographic: Gamers between the age of 13-24, primarily male
• User Base: Drawn from 15 million+ Xfire users
• Transaction Data: Analysis of Liver Gamer transaction data by country (Korea, U.S. Germany, Japan, the Philippines and Vietnam) and game from 2002-2009

Part Two Games Owned and Bought: Physical Goods

• Games owned, spending and units bought (overall and broken down by country)

Part Three Purchasing Digital Content

• How many have purchased (overall and broken down by country)
• What type of content purchased (overall and broken down by country)
• Analysis: Attitude questions on Downloadable Content (overall and broken down by country)
• Services used to Buy Digital Content (overall and broken down by country)

Part Four Systems Owned

• Systems owned (overall and broken down by country)
• DLC content purchase by platform overall for each platform (Xbox 360, PS3, PC, Wii, iPod, mobile phone etc)

Part Five iPhone/iPod Touch

• Ownership by country
• Applications purchased (overall)
• Spending on games (overall and broken down by country)

Part Six Subscription games

• Total paying a monthly subscription (overall and broken down by country)
• Number of games currently subscribed to (overall and broken down by country)
• Amount spent (overall and broken down by country)
• Actual games subscribed to (overall)

Part Seven In-Game Goods

• Data analysis of Live Gamer data by country
• Average per transaction of all games combined by country
• High game average per transaction by country (for games with 2+ year track record)
• Hypothetical models for future product

• Purchase of in-game goods (overall and broken down by country)
• Types of in-game goods purchased (overall and broken down by country)
• Reasons for buying in-game goods (overall and broken down by country)
• Amount spent on in-game goods (overall and broken down by country)
• F2P games used (overall)
• Frequency of F2P play (overall and broken down by country)

Part Eight Trading Goods

• Purchasing goods from another player (overall and broken down by country)
• Selling Goods to another player (overall and broken down by country)
• Opinions on trading goods (overall and broken down by country)

Report Price: $2,995

Includes written pdf report and Excel data files

Contact: Ozzie Monge at [email protected] or [email protected]