NPD: consumer spending on video gaming in the US hit a record $10.86B between January and March, up 9% YoY, with sales from video game content up 11% to $9.58B
New numbers from NPD confirm what we've known for a while: the first quarter of 2020 was a very good one for gaming companies.
Context & Ripple Effects
This quarter caps a two-year run: NPD already logged 2018 as a record $43.4B year for US games, so Q1 2020's $10.86B arrives on top of an elevated base rather than a recovery. The timing matters — lockdowns pushed spending into content, which grew 11% to $9.58B while the rest of the basket lagged.
SuperData's parallel reading of March — $10B in worldwide digital spending, up 11%, led by $5.7B on mobile — confirms the surge was digital-first and global, not a US-only quirk in NPD's methodology.
First-order effects
- Publishers with large digital and live-service catalogs capture most of the gain: content's $9.58B share means roughly nine of every ten dollars spent went to software rather than hardware or accessories.
Second-order effects
- Mobile's outsized role — SuperData put it at $5.7B of March's $10B digital spend — pressures console-centric publishers to accelerate their own free-to-play and in-game monetization roadmaps to compete for the same stay-at-home hours.
- Hardware demand rises against constrained retail channels, shifting the mix further toward digital storefronts where publishers keep more of each sale.
Third-order effects
- The later NPD readings show this was a pulled-forward peak, not a new baseline: quarterly spending fell 8% YoY in Q1 2022 and 13% YoY in Q2 2022, when subscription content was the lone growth segment — meaning post-surge retention, not the surge itself, determines which publishers kept their gains.
The trend: US game spending now moves in engagement shocks that spike revenue within quarters and partially retrace over the following two years, leaving subscription and live-service models as the durable residue.