Digital game revenue has climbed 15 percent since 2016

Industry analyst SuperData Research has announced that digital video game spending has increased by 15 percent, year-over-year in October. Most of this is attributed to multiplayer games, despite the current controversy they are surrounded in.

Collectively, sales on PC, consoles and mobile amounted to $8.5 billion, an increase of $1.1 billion on previous year. Given the worldwide rankings chart published by the researchers, this is credited to multiplayer games, with mainstays League of Legends topping PC sales and FIFA 18 taking the crown for consoles. Tencent’s MOBA Honor of Kings is top of the mobile chart, helping push smartphone game sales up by 19 percent in comparison to 2016.

Of course, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds takes PC’s second place with its 15+ million sales. Destiny 2 makes it onto both the PC and console rankings, at fourth and third place respectively.

That’s not to say that single-player titles don’t have their moment to shine, as Middle-earth: Shadow of War also appears on both charts, taking ninth place for PC sales and a whopping second place for console. Assassin’s Creed Origins and South Park: The Fractured But Whole are also notable single-player entries on the console list.

SuperData comments on the longevity of these statistics, stating that single-player titles and some multiplayer games will struggle to maintain profitable income due to the wonky implementation of microtransactions. Unfortunately, these additional sources of revenue are important in profits, as shown by the graph displaying Grand Theft Auto V’s digital console revenue alone.

KitGuru Says: The success of multiplayer games is hardly surprising given recent tides, but it does spell bad news for single-player experiences as profitability continues to grow for the online sides of things. This means, if it wasn’t obvious beforehand, it is increasingly likely that we will see more single-player titles try their hands at microtransactions in the future.

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