Same here. Of course, the shelves are pretty bare in my local store, but they sure have a lot of shelf space.
My Best Buy has a pretty decent selection but the Gamestops near me far outstrip their collections. Then again, these Gamestops have outstanding collections to begin with.
Strangely enough, I had one of my best experiences in game purchasing at a Blockbuster’s a month ago. They had recently opened up a used games section, and the prices seemed slightly better than GameRush or the others. There were several games that were only $6, for instance.
Told the kids about it and they had 3 games they wanted to trade in. Turns out that Blockbuster was giving an additional $5 credit per game for trading in 3 or more games (building up inventory deal?) The upshot is that we swapped 3 used games for 3 better used games (SSX 3!) and still had a little game credit left over. Nice, though there is no cash option.
Clerks were pleasant, but their chatter was all baseball – Cardinals fans, so they’re probably in mourning now.
As a veteran of Nintendo discount bins, I must say that the Mario Party games have the distinction of being popular titles that just never seem to get traded in. I’ve seen 1 MP4 and I’ve never found an MP5. Maybe it’s just a local thing or my bad luck, I dunno.
I’ll throw in another thumbs up for Blockbuster’s game sections. I hadn’t been in a Blockbuster in years, and a couple months ago I went in to see what their used game section was like. A lot of the games are not in their original cases, but a few are, and those tend to be good bargains. I found a copy of Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner for $16 that had clearly never been removed from its case.
Best Buy doesn’t carry anywhere near the SKUs of EB or Gamestop. That’s always been the biggest problem with shopping at Best Buy or any big box retailer. They simply won’t have certain games and they will not carry them for long unless they’re good sellers.
–Dave
I’ve seen both of them used fairly often at the local EBs. Never cheap, though.
The EBs around here were selling Mario Kart used for $49.99 - same as the new price.
I honestly can’t think of a game from the past two years I couldn’t find at Best Buy.
My local EB was out of San Andreas games on Tuesday.
My local Gamestop had a few copies left.
I don’t feel the hate. Pretty much the only difference between the two companies these days is that one buys and sells used PC software; the other buys and sells used GBAs.
–scharmers
–a nigga like me is goin insane
You could find it fine as long as you were buying it within the first few months. After that? Forget it. That’s the problem with the big box retailer.
I imagine you can’t find Druaga there right now.
–Dave
I seriously doubt you can find Highway to the Reich at Best Buy.
— Alan
I sell my stuff on Ars Technica’s Agora forum, and use their feedback system. Anandtech has a similar one, but I have only used it once, compared to the tens of transactions I’ve cleanly made on Ars Agora.
I imagine you can’t find Druaga there right now.
True, but you can’t find it at Gamestop, either.
Or about 50% of EB outlets. Well, maybe 75%, since the 50% of the 50% that got it probably sold their lone copy to weirdos like me.
On a slightly related note: isn’t it strange that we actually have to worry about this shit? What’s stopping game retailers from turning into on-demand DVD burning outlets?
Drive space is practically free; duplication burning time is extremely low; it’d cut shipping costs; it’d cut return costs; and a million other reasons.
Yeah yeah, I know, the DREADED PIRACY BOOGEEYMAN maybe, but the downside there seems largely hypothetical, while the upside on costs seems insane.
I would agree with this. The gamestore of the future could look something like Kinkos, you go in and pick your game. They dial in the code and it is burned to DVD or whatever super high density disk is used then. A manual prints, for $15 extra you can get the extended strategy guide and it’s all done in color with a nice spiral binding.
On release day the gamestores can download the new game from the secure database and start printing them up. In fact every PC game requires a certian kind of copy protection technology like requiring a copy protecting “game drive” that’s available as a free upgrade to your PC, that’s the only way the PC game could survive with piracy and all.
Local deliveries are available in all areas that this store is in, killing the online retailers who still ship disks and manuals across the country.
It’s entirely feasable at this point, if any of you tech savy folks who know people in the game publishing industry and want to start this up I’ll be your first customer.
Weren’t there some pilot programs doing something similar for music CDs? If so, are they still around? (I’m guessing if they exist, they’re kaput, which is unfortunate.)
They’re actually doing this software to CD burning kiosk type thing at Comp USA in some locations.
You could find it fine as long as you were buying it within the first few months. After that? Forget it. That’s the problem with the big box retailer.
I imagine you can’t find Druaga there right now.
–Dave[/quote]
Haven’t looked, but I will sometime in the next few days.
Does it really matter to the original topic? If Best Buy is able to consistently have most games in on release day, then the EBs and Gamestops of the world are going to continue to lose sales on release-day purchasing. It doesn’t matter whether we can find it at Best Buy two months later, because by then EB isn’t bugging you for your pre-order receipt.
If you can’t find it at Best Buy two months later, then why not just order it from any of the really good online retailers (other than Gamestop or EB, naturally)? I order stuff like that from GoGamer.