Boom, I tell you! In a recent report quoted here in GameDaily, market research firm Strategy Analytics predicts that the online games market will grow 25% year over year, and that by 2011 it'll make up one third of all game software revenue.

Let's put some real numbers behind that: right now online games account for $4 Billion in revenue. That means downloadable games will be pulling in over $11 billion annually in four years. Those numbers are staggering!

But not really surprising, especially not to you, since you're reading this on a file download site. World of Warcraft alone, for example, has millions of users worldwide, and subscription rates are still strong. Meanwhile, as I blogged about a couple days ago, the casual and micropayment MMO scenes are booming, as are casual single-player game sales. On top of that, add your digital direct sales -- buying games online through our sister-site Direct2Drive or Valve's Steam service. Hold on, I'm not done: downloadable games are proving to be big sellers on both the Wii and Xbox Live Arcade, and Sony is going to be more aggressive in that space as well.

The audience is also growing: Nintendo is making a heroic effort to bring non-gamers into the gaming fold with inexpensive, easy-to-play titles.

On top of all these avenues to download and buy games, you've also got broadband adoption and new markets all over the world. Think about it: if you put a game online, you can sell it anywhere (well, anywhere you can get over the language and currency barriers, but the latter is getting easier all the time.) It's no surprise that online game sales are going to grow. It's a natural fit. In fact, I'd argue it should be the way to buy games. At the rate that digital storage is coming down in cost, I wouldn't be surprised if console systems will soon come with massive hard drives and no reason to grab physical media at all.

It's a brave new world and stuff.

      -Fargo