The NPD Group Reports 16 Percent Increase in Digital Sales for 2012

The NPD Group recently weighed in on the amount of money spent on other forms of content like used and rental games, and digital format sales.

Interestingly, while the former reached $1.79 billion, the latter saw a revenue of $5.92 billion generated from. Remember that this covers full game downloads, DLC, subscriptions, mobile and social network games, etc.

Industry analyst of The NPD Group Liam Callahan stated that, “When including all other forms of content spending outside of new physical games, the 2012 U.S. games market was more than twice as large as the total spending on new physical games alone.

“There were divergent trends when looking at content spending in 2012 as a whole, with a decrease of 21 percent in spending on physical content while digital content spending grew 16 percent; both formats combined for a total decline of 9 percent for the year.”

Kinda gives credence to the claims from Dead Space 3 producer John Calhoun that “micro-transactions are a standard part of gaming” for this generation, doesn’t it?