NPD: US digital sales total $1.4 billion in Q3

The NPD Group's monthly sales reports do not factor in digital content, and this has led some, including Electronic Arts, to shrug off the firm's findings. Today, however, the research group released the results of its Q3 2012 Games Market Dynamics U.S. report, revealing digital spend in the United States alone accounted for $1.4 billion from July-September.

NPD defines "digital" as full-game and add-on content downloads, subscriptions, mobile games, and social network games. This segment's $1.4 billion, added to the $1.07 billion from new physical and PC game software and the $399 million from used and rental games brings the grand total for the quarter to $2.87 billion.

"When including overall consumer content spending across both digital and physical formats in Q3 2012, there was a positive story for the industry," said NPD analyst Liam Callahan in a statement. "Despite declines in physical format spending of 16 percent from Q3 2011, strong growth in digital format spending, up 22 percent, helped offset this decline and led to 1 percent decline in content spending from the same quarter last year. Mobile App spending, digital full game downloads, and downloadable add-on content were the areas within digital format spending that helped drive this increase."