According to research firm SuperData, DLC on PC and consoles soared to $325 million in November, a year-on-year increase of 25 percent over last November's $230 million. SuperData says that the spike "especially" pertains to console DLC. That figure is also up 31 percent over October, SuperData notes.
The company points to the releases of big-name franchises, listing
Call of Duty: Ghosts, Need for Speed Rivals, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, and
Battlefield 4 as drivers of these digital sales.
"We expect this trend to continue for the remainder of the year," states the report.
Mobile spending has also increased 34 percent year-on-year, SuperData says, reaching $274 million for November 2013. Despite this, the company cautions that incumbents like
Candy Crush Saga developer King and
Clash of Clans developer Supercell are aggressively acquiring users -- primarily to lock out the competition.
Both of these leaps are coming at the expense of free-to-play
and subscription MMOs, SuperData says, which both dropped in revenues for November.
But how reliable is this data? Digital numbers are hard to track, so we spoke to SuperData CEO Joost van Dreunen to find out how they get it:
"We base our monthly numbers on digital transaction data collected across the various platforms, in collaboration with developers and publishers. On average, we capture the monthly spending of 3.2 million digital gamers. We combine this quantitative data with recurrent qualitative studies and secondary industry sources," says van Dreunen.
