Chris Petrovic is the GM of GameStop Digital Ventures and he says that mass market gamers are very slow to adopt to digital distribution as their main source of acquiring games.
He goes on to say that there will always be a huge demand for non-digital methods of purchasing software and hardware. He offers up a figure that 70% of the purchases made of digital goods in their store are being made with payment methods that aren't a credit card. So, if you think about it, those persons not using a credit card are finding it a bit more difficult to adopt a digital purchasing lifestyle than those that have a credit card. That is where the mass market is right now, still paying with cash or store credit.
(via)
There’s a huge delta between early adopters and the mass market. I think it’s much larger than any of us are willing to acknowledge sometimes, because it just isn’t a fun story. I was sharing with you earlier a statistic. When I came on board with the company, I believe almost 50 percent of our used game sales were for the PS2. This was in 2009, 2010, somewhere in there. That was a mind-boggling stat for me, when you think about a platform that first came out however many years before I joined, and it was still accounting for the majority of used game sales.
You think about how much longer people hold on to their stuff that they’ve invested a lot of money in. You realize that folks are value-oriented, folks are not like us, necessarily, the ones waiting in line to get things on day one. They have kids at home, they don’t want to spend as much money as a new product would cost. They’re happy to spend after it’s come down a little bit or after it’s a few years old, whether it’s a game or a console. It was eye-opening to me to go into the midwest and go into the southeast and see that behavior that’s fundamentally at a much slower cadence than how we’re operating here.
You think about how much longer people hold on to their stuff that they’ve invested a lot of money in. You realize that folks are value-oriented, folks are not like us, necessarily, the ones waiting in line to get things on day one. They have kids at home, they don’t want to spend as much money as a new product would cost. They’re happy to spend after it’s come down a little bit or after it’s a few years old, whether it’s a game or a console. It was eye-opening to me to go into the midwest and go into the southeast and see that behavior that’s fundamentally at a much slower cadence than how we’re operating here.
He goes on to say that there will always be a huge demand for non-digital methods of purchasing software and hardware. He offers up a figure that 70% of the purchases made of digital goods in their store are being made with payment methods that aren't a credit card. So, if you think about it, those persons not using a credit card are finding it a bit more difficult to adopt a digital purchasing lifestyle than those that have a credit card. That is where the mass market is right now, still paying with cash or store credit.
(via)