Frontier Developments’ CEO David Braben has commented on the disastrous events of 2020 and how they could shape the video games industry moving forward. Speaking at GamesIndustry.biz’s Investment Summit Online [via VGC], Braben said that the COVID-19 pandemic could play a huge role in the shift from physical games to digital.
“We’ve seen an acceleration in the transition from physical to digital,” he said. “That is a good thing. It’s probably two to three years before physical more or less goes away, and it’s probably accelerated that timescale a bit.”
Though we’ve known for a while that physical games are more problematic than digital (in many cases, at least), COVID-19 has definitely made the differences a lot more apparent.
Many retailers have shipped games to peoples’ homes with the caveat that, yeah, due to the pandemic, they might not arrive on time. Meanwhile, those stuck at home who might not usually consider themselves gamers, have seemingly been reaching more for the instant gratification that digital downloads provide.
However, the sales of physical games is still on the rise. In the UK, the month of April saw over one million sales of physical games – the highest in five years.
“We’re very lucky to be in a really great industry where, from a financial point of view, things are going really well,” Braben said. “Sales are up, the number of players in our games are up quite substantially, so there’s that really positive side [to things].
“Some of this is actually quite sticky. We first saw this in China, where there was quite a big uplift in players during their lockdown back in February. What’s interesting is we get foresight of things with China going back to work, and we do see a slightly higher level of sales still persisting than we did beforehand.”
The future of video games, like all COVID-impacted sectors, remains foggy and unclear.
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