While waiting in line at a local EB, I overheard a clerk telling someone that yesterday would be the last day that they’d be accepting used PC games toward store credit. I guess once they’ve sold out of the inventory they have, that’s it. Supposedly this is all a result of the Gamestop buyout, but I don’t know… does anyone else know if this is really the case? If so, I have to say that’s kind of a drag – I’ve always preferred to buy games in person, but used PC games are more or less the only thing I ‘browse’ when I’m in an EB. I guess it’s finally time to start doing all my buying online…
If they are going to be like the gamestops in my area, they will be dropping new pc games as well.
You know, at first I thought “Holy shit, this is horrible!” But then I realized it’ll just force developers to switch to some kind of digital delivery… and that’s going to benefit everyone in the long run.
I don’t think its that horrible from an over all industry standpoint. The majority of pc game sales come from the 30 slots at Walmart. EB games was one of the last places that would carry some of the smaller publishers and this is going to kill them but they were one foot in the grave anyways.
I do not want to restart the used game debate, but it strikes me that part of the difficulty with selling used PC games is the nonstandard manuals, packaging, and boxes.
I do not buy many used PC games because the display is typically a crappy mass of jewelcases and beaten up looking manuals with little organization.
Compare that to console games, which can be arranged neatly and sold pretty much in the same fashion as new games.
This sucks. I’ve gotten some great used-game bargains at EB over the years, including a copy of Jagged Alliance 2 Gold for THREE DOLLARS just about two weeks ago, and a copy of Call of Duty United Offensive for a mere 13. Oh well, there’s always eBay and such, but then you have shipping and all that bullshit.
Spotted this over at CivFanatics:
Interesting, whoever told you we stopped taking PC Games a few days ago misread the email. We stop taking them tomorrow, wednesday. We’ve been taking them all the way through the end of today.
This is because GameStop has more stores than EB and doesn’t do preowned PC. After the merger is complete (it hasn’t even really starte dyet, we’re just preparing) we would end up with 2500 stores that don’t have preowned PC, and 1800 stores that do… we opted to stop taking them as they are usually a disaster (nobody keeps the boxes and the cd cases break and are hard to display) and not a huge portion of our business.
Before JMR posted that, I would have said exactly that was the reason they stopped. It’s simply because the merger means less than half the stores would be accepting them. Rather than have all the GameStops start dealing in used PC games, they just quit the business entirely.
I suppose that Mark Rein has just started cheering. I guess every publisher and developer will now be expecting their PC game sales to jump dramatically because those damn dirty pre-owned games just went away.
What are they going to blame a PC sales decline on now that no one will be trading in or buying used in 1800 stores for that market anymore?
–Dave
non-standardization in terms of PC specs in the market, and the fact that the Hardware upgrade life-cycle being about 1/2 that of the consoles? :P
Dave, shut it. Jesus H. Christ, you think we’re all drooling morons or something.
The way some people were replying in the thread about used games, I really do wonder…
–Dave
I’ve never really trusted used PC games as much as console games anyway. For all you know, the CD-Key could already be banned from numerous servers, shared with half the country, missing…
But I thought used pc sales were such a gigantic part of their business… and was the only thing driving new pc game sales? Well thats what I get for listening to an internet forum…
Chet
OH NO YOU DI-INT!
Charles, don’t get me started on you and your fancy digital downloads. Those make people miserable in the long run because they take away retail jobs! Read that on a forum as well, so it has to be true!
Chet
It didn’t seem like EB put alot of effort into displaying the games and making the idea of shopping for PC games a pleasant experience. It’s not surprising that it’s on the chopping block.
The only real use for used PC games I found was being able to buy old games long-since out of print because someone finally got around to turning in his previous copy. For example, at EB last weekend while picking up a copy of Burnout 2, I also saw a copy of HoMM 4. I missed it the first go round, and it’s impossible to find new, period. (What’d they print 4 copies?)
For most other things the life cycle of PC games seems more robust, so if I want a copy of Game_X cheap I can just wait for the budget release, or the ultra-budget jewelcase release, or somesuch. (Or pick up the exact same thing imported from England by GoGamer for half price or less for reasons I’m still entirely unclear about.)
we opted to stop taking them as they are usually a disaster (nobody keeps the boxes and the cd cases break and are hard to display)
Why the hell hasn’t the PC games industry adopted DVD cases yet? Everybody loves them. They fit on your shelf, they keep the manual and disk in one place, and there’s no excess cardboard to either throw away or clog up your home.
Speaking of selling or trading in used games, Amazon.com kind of ticked me off last week. I often will take my used PC games that are short on replay value and sell them on Amazon’s Markeplace. This has worked really well, as it gives me back a significant amount of money that I usually turn around and put towards buying more games.
This time, though, when I tried to put my PC game up for sale I got a message saying that “The item for which you have attempted to create a listing is a restricted item in our Computer & Video Games store. Listing against restricted items in this store is limited to pre-approved sellers only.”
Oookay, so I scanned the page on how to become one of these pre-approved sellers. I found this: “At this time, we are not accepting requests for pre-approval for our Electronics, Software, or Computer and Video Games stores.”
F’ers. So it’s off to eBay I went for a much less seller-friendly experience. This restriction, by the way, isn’t present if you’re trying to sell a console game.
DVD cases imply switching away from CDs. The industry hasn’t done that yet.