Beancounters at SuperData have published their latest market research report, which found that premium digital PC games raked in $586 million on Black Friday and Cyber Monday, which is 18.3 per cent higher compared to last year's results.
According to the report, total digital spending reached a record high of $4 billion, which is 14.3 per cent higher compared to Black Friday and Cyber Monday's numbers from the year before. Factor in the $586 million reeled in by the premium PC gaming sector and it's clear that the master race is in a pretty good place at the moment.
Even though Sony's PlayStation 4 and Microsoft's Xbox One are at the end of their life cycles, their consoles have been stringing some really impressive results as of late. Their performance in the first half of 2018 actually offset some of the substantial losses by the mobile gaming sector, while highlighting the advantages of subscription services.
SuperData's report has found that premium digital titles like Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 and Red Dead Redemption 2 were among the main drivers of this year's booming holiday revenues. Both games had that special something - Rockstar was fully expected to deliver a , while CoD went where no CoD went before and ditched the campaign for battle royale.
Not that it seems to matter anymore, because the yelps of feigned outcry have long been drowned out by the sound of Call of Duty: Black Ops 4's guns. Blackout and Zombies seem to have done well to compensate for the lack of a traditional campaign and the game's opening weekend sales netted the affiliated companies a sum of .
Interestingly, this is exactly what SuperData predicted will happen back in , when they predicted that games with a battle royale component will account for 12 per cent of the total digital games revenue in 2018. EA and DICE have obviously missed , which is probably the reason why Battlefield V isn't discussed much in the report.
Rockstar Games
In case you're wondering about Cyber Monday and when it became a thing, let me do what I do every year - ask the same question and check again. It was started by retailers in 2005, with the goal being to boost sales by making the first Monday after Thanksgiving a day reserved for digital shopping. Of course, if you've celebrated properly, you're unlikely to get out of bed to begin with, so fair play we guess.
You can find SuperData's report .
Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 by Treyarch, Beenox and Activision
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