Physical retail declined, but mobile and digital distribution managed to compensate

Feb 12, 2014 10:30 GMT  ·  By

The NPD Group says that total game sales in the United States grew by 1 percent over 2013, when new, used, rental and digital versions of all the releases for all platforms are taken into account.

The overall value reached 15.39 billion dollars (11.1 billion Euro), which is an impressive number on its own, but a disappointing one considering that the Xbox One from Microsoft and the PlayStation 4 from Sony were launched late last year.

The next-gen consoles were supposed to significantly increase game sales, but the decline in the previous generation was bigger than analyst estimated, according to VG247.

The NPD Group says that physical game sales have decline by about 11 percent when compared to 2012 and that hardware sales have seen an increase of 5%.

An analyst has already said that he expects the PlayStation 4 to beat the Xbox One in January 2014 in overall sales in the United States.