We've been talking about how the PC game industry is transitioning from a retail store business to a digital download model for some time now. However, it's never been totally clear how much revenues digital downloads of games from places like Steam, Direct2Drive, Impulse and others have generated. Today Gamesindustry.biz states that a new report claims revenues from PC game downloads from various sources will generate over $1 billion in revenue in 2009.

The report comes from GfK Chart-Track which says that such downloads created just $600 million in revenue in 2008. If true that means this part of the industry is exploding. GfK Chart-Track director Dorian Bloch admits that they would like to include such data in the total sales numbers of individual games. However, they are unable to do so without "without a wider selection of data from multiple publishers."