Sales of video games in Australia surged 35% during the pandemic year.
15.8 million boxed and digital video games were sold in the market during 2020. That is according to GSD, which tracks boxed game sales plus digital game sales from most major games publishers (Nintendo and Bethesda are the notable absentees, see the bottom fo the article for the full list of participating companies).
Unlike other markets, the dominant sector was the boxed games business, which accounted for 8.5 million games sold. That is actually a rise of 15% over the year before. However, the download market is accelerating faster, with 7.3 million games sold via Xbox Live, PSN, Steam and Nintendo Eshop, which is a rise of 68% over 2019.
Of course, the comparisons are not like-for-like, with a few publishers -- particularly Nintendo -- currently not supporting the digital charts project. Therefore, to get a better understanding of the digital transition, we need to discount those companies from the data. By doing this, we can see that 58% of sales from tracked games publishers came via download stores, which is a significant changed from 2019, when the majority of games (55%) were sold in boxes.

Nintendo and GTA 5 come top in big year for Australia game sales | Australia Annual Report | GamesIndustry.biz