A friend of mine recently opened up a new game store in San Diego, and got a nice writeup/interview on it here.
I really like the concept he’s going for here, with the more Apple Store approach to the layout and such. Here’s hoping there’s room in the game retail world for more of this kind of thing.
Looks cool. It’ll be interesting to see if it succeeds.
Personally, I always wonder why GameStops still seems to be like somebody cut-and-pasted the gaming section of Best Buy out and dropped it into a mall outlet.
Shop looks cool, but the logo (green “Games On”) could do with some apple-style work!
Looks awesome, I would love to work at and/or run a place like that, it reminds me of the things I used to love about working at Egghead.
Nice, I’m totally going to check that place out this weekend.
Too bad I don’t live in San Diego anymore- I would absolutely check out a place like that.
If there was a place like that around here, I’d probably get “Apple Store’d” meaning, I’d like it so much, that when I had to go back to an old-fashioned store everything else would feel cluttered and stupid.
Place looks awesome…wish it weren’t so far away…I’d love to go there!
If I still lived in SD, that would be my new haunt.
Cool concept, I hope he makes a go of it financially. Retail is really, really hard.
I would totally shop there…
… if I lived in San Diego.
That store looks nice and I hope it succeeds. I would shop there as well. One comment, though, there’s a reason why most stores don’t have nice Rock Band displays out and the like, and its not because GameStop isn’t crummy and trashy nowadays (though that is true). It’s because customers treat kiosks like garbage. It sucks ass but its true. How many broken guitars is he willing to pay for?
That store looks very cool. That article needs editing >.<.
Point about the treatment of kiosks, but then again this isn’t some big box store where nobody has time or the inclination to keep an eye on how the customers are treating the demo units.
Plus they were smart enough to put it in a very central location. I’d expect people to be on pretty good behavior there.
The place looks really nice.
I didn’t read the whole article, but how does he plan to make money? Are the games priced $5 above retail?
Sweet. More reason to move south. Damn this ghetto to hell.
I really love their design concept and couldn’t agree more with the point about visual clutter and floor-to-ceiling box covers you see in most game stores. That makes me want to leave. Or at least, it makes me NOT want to browse.
I like the concept, but based on the first photo of the article, I’m afraid that if I walked past the storefront without foreknowledge, I’d mentally process it as a high-end home electronics store and keep walking. It’s down to conditioning, I know, but if there’s no red in the signage, and no garish posters and cutouts cluttering the displays, I just can’t make the association with games. And if I did make it inside, my instinctive thinking would probably be along the lines of “Wow, this place is really nice. Must be expensive!”
If I had the enthusiasm or general drive, I’d totally do something like this up where I am.
Software Alley on Broadway was actually a pretty pleasant place to buy games in Vancouver, some fifteen years ago. Competitive pricing, too.