While the sales of new games in retail have struggled recently, Gamasutra recently reported that the digital download services continue to see strong growth:

• Valve’s Steam service revealed a 97% increase in download sales, year-over-year
• IGN’s own direct download service, Direct2Drive, has also surged year on year, according to the company, posting gains of 56% compared to twelve months previously.
• paid downloads on Xbox Live increased 73 percent over the 12 months through June, as a total of 20 million users are now on the Xbox 360’s online service.

It is good to see areas of resilience in gaming/online entertainment.  There are headwinds, but more of a slowdown than a plummet.

Of course, on this topic, I spoke to one small PC game developer last night who has found online to be an extremely poor distribution channel, but has been thrilled lately with their sales performance at Walmart, Target, etc. So it is clearly hard to extrapolate micro situations from the macro data.

Conventional wisdom is that in down economies, entertainment is counter-cyclical.  In the console space, the sales of new games has come under pressure in the poor economy, but the sales of used games is way up as well as subscriptions to mail-based video game rental programs (see Nielsen report). Now Comscore has tallied up US visitors to online gaming sites and estimated that the audience size grew 22% when compared to the same month a year ago: May 2008: 71.6M; May 2009: 87.1M.

Yahoo Games ranked first with 19.4M users, a 22% market share.  Check out the release for the full list and ranking.

P.S. I think that Comscore really should add the game play on social networking sites to this report.