One slight downside to buying digital - a good friend and I were planning to play some Halo 5 recently, and he was driving himself nuts looking for the disc. Never found it and we ended up playing something else - you can see where this is going, he forgot he had bought a digital copy.
They tried the retro-gaming thing, but it fell apart pretty fast. I imagine they didn’t want to deal with the enormous reproduction-cart market that plagues almost every cartridge-based platform at this point.
Oh, I know, I wish they would have stuck with it. Retro gaming hardware and cart prices have been skyrocketing, and if Gamestop could be a reliable place to buy original carts/equipment, they could be a leader in that market. A lot of the mom and pop stores don’t have the manpower or technology to deal with the repro carts.
It’s also their shit pricing scheme. Trade in an AAA title, get between $5-10, usually. $20 if you’re really lucky. Then they turn around and resell for $54.99 instead of the new price of $59.99. Add to that older titles that are still very high-priced for used copies…well, no wonder they’re closing physical stores.
I get people don’t like Gamestop, but this paragraph is horseshit. A game selling for full retail, that sells used for 55 (49.50 for club members) trades in for a hell of a lot more than 5 bucks. 20-25 before special offers (potentially bumping it up considerably) is a lot more realistic. If a game is trading in for 5, it’s probably selling for 20-25. As far as prices on old titles, it depends upon demand and availability. If there aren’t many copies around, the price will be higher if it is sought after. There’s no mystery here.
Edit: as for retro consoles, they have trade values on the website for some old stuff like original PlayStation.
The thing is, the days of stumbling across a copy of EarthBound for a buck at a garage sale are largely over. For the most part, people will look up what their old games are worth, and sell them online if they still hold any value. GameStop would be incredibly stupid to attempt to enter that market as a reseller.
I’d be all for game stores. Hell I worked at Egghead Software for 5+ years while in college (Remember them?). But then EB/Gamestop decided that they were a fucking pawn shop and games were simply their coin of choice, F that.
There’s a reason that there aren’t any stores that exist solely to sell new video games & hardware. The profit margins suck. The big boxes don’t care, so they will be in it as long as physical games are a thing, but if you think there’s ever going to be a store like the old days it ain’t happening.
Egghead…man those were good times. I used to get the catalogs all the time and spend hours going through them. Egghead, club Mac, Mac mall, etc
I frequent two of my local tabletop games shops, both of which have a great relationship with the Raleigh Tabletop RPGs Meetup group I’ve mentioned. Event Horizon south of me hosts our SOPs–the Semi Organized Plays that run 3x tables every other week in 3-month, story-connected “seasons” all year long, while The Gamer’s Armory to the west hosts our collaboration with D&D Encounters and also all of our large-scale (10-20 table) Quarterly events.
I myself host a biweekly game at the latter; we’ve been playing there two Saturdays a month for about 2.5 years now. Every week, we camp out at one of the tables in back, buy like $40 worth of snacks and drinks amongst the 7 of us, and occasionally nab some dice, minifigs, dice, markets, etc. as we need for that game or others that people in the group run/play in.They probably average about $100/mo from our group, which isn’t huge, but it’s super consistent. They love us to bits and go out of their way to accommodate whenever possible; only the Magic The Gathering pre-releases take precedence over my table at this point.
I accepted that as fact years ago. I just cannot envision a scenario that would make it possible these days, even less so in the future.
However, the fond memories of the days when I’d walk into our local Software Etc. and see PC games DOMINATE the store will not be forgotten. Picking up boxes and looking at the screenshots on the back, and reading the text. And I had no problem plunking down full retail price for certain games. And I still have those boxes; hundreds of them.
I ran out of storage space in my house years ago, so Steam and GOG came along at just the right time for me. I still loathe the idea of having my (newer) game collection tied to the internet, but I’ve accepted that that is the just the way things are, and will likely always be.
And I enjoy playing my games on Steam. But they don’t give me the sense of ownership I get with my old self-contained disks in boxes. Thankfully, I have pretty much all of my favorite games from my personal “Golden Age of PC Gaming” in boxes on shelves, along with at least one old legacy rig to run them on if I need to.
So yes, I miss buying games at retail. I miss it terribly. I miss Software Etc. I miss Electronics Boutique.
But I miss a lot of other things even worse: My 1972 Chevelle SS 402 convertible, my 1979 Trans Am, my virginity, the house my family once lived in when I was a kid. Some things I have lost forever, but I hang on to what I am able to, namely my boxed games, favorite books, and my old vinyl records.
Software Etc. is something that is gone forever.
Gamestop is headed into oblivion as well. In fact, it’s been dead to me since they stopped carrying PC games.
I’m right there with you. I didn’t have a console in between an Atari 2600 and an Xbox 360 (at that point I was working for Gamestop and started buying the current consoles so I understood them and could help customers better). I fought to keep our meager PC section in my store to no avail. You’re preaching to the choir.
Meanwhile GAME, the UK’s equivalent of Gamestop, published its half-year results today.
[quote]The total Retail mint market in the UK for the first seven weeks of the second half was 22% up compared to the equivalent period last year with our UK Retail GTV up 7% over the same period. In Spain the total mint market was up 51% compared to the equivalent period in H2 last year, with Game Spain’s GTV up 38% in local currency during the first seven weeks of the half. This growth is largely explained by the successful launch of Nintendo SwitchTM in both markets and going forwards this positive momentum will be highly dependent on stock availability.
[/quote]
Don’t worry, everything’s fine!
[quote=“Telefrog, post:194, topic:14370”]
Another example, people love social media. They love sharing and communicating via social media. Someday, social media will bite them on their collective asses when their decades of personal photos and histories are lost to them.[/quote]
I know this is a tangent, but this argument makes no sense. You’re assuming that social media exists as an archival tool, which is clearly not the case: Social media is there so you can share what you’re doing RIGHT NOW with other people. (Hence the name, “social media.”) Sure, it’s sometimes fun to see “What was I doing five years ago?”, but the majority of all social media use is seeing what’s happening at the moment. Losing those posts would hardly “bite anyone on their collective asses.”
And secondly, if you’re really worried about losing all your data on social media, what’s the option? Just don’t use social media? So instead of potentially losing all those memories, you just don’t create any memories in the first place. It’s like being afraid your house will burn down someday, so you just burn it down today instead.
I get the sense of nostalgia: I used to have all my music lined up in CDs along the wall, and I know people who still miss the days of the huge album artwork. And I understand the ritual of selecting and playing music intentionally. But for all practical purposes, we’re better off today. Sure, I miss album artwork…but I can select literally any song I have ever owned and play it in about five seconds. I can shuffle through an artist, or a decade, or through my entire collection. I don’t have to worry about skips or scratches. By most measures, I’m better off today.
Years from now, kids won’t tie their “sense of ownership” to cardboard boxes that take up too much space and are largely empty. They’ll recognize their ownership by the games they can play, not the relics that they came packaged in.
My evidence is that every time something happens to people’s social media accounts, one of the first things they cry about is the loss of their photos and history. Is it logical? No. But that’s not what I was arguing.
Years from now? No, they’re already there.
I’m not, but that’s because I’m old. :)
One nice thing about music today is that it is not automatically tied to the internet. Sure, you can do it that way (and I do), but the old ways are still there for those that still want it that way. CD’s are still being sold by pretty much every band out there. You can still get most of your favorite artists on vinyl if you want to. Hell, Nuclear Blast America recently sent me an ad where one of the bands was releasing their latest album on cassette! Blew my mind.
Which brings me to this: Why is it that music is DRM-free, and games are (usually) not?
EDIT: I mean, I already know why games use DRM. I guess I’m just wondering why music does not.
EDIT 2: Nevermind. Further thought reminded me about Sony’s attempt years ago.
GA has the best selection of wargames I’ve seen in any store ever and I miss it like the dickens.
And Scott is a prince.
Scott and Crystal are probably my favorite small business owners, full stop. Sorry, @Brad_Wardell. The number of times they’ve gone out of their way to help us succeed, whether a huge quarterly with 50 attendees or my little table of six or seven is genuinely uncountable. And yes, the wargames selection (and the huge free to use terrain sandboxes!) is just crazy. GA is my home away from home :-)
I really think that Gamestop is simply overstored at the moment. This is a rather normal correction for them IMO. They probably don’t need four stores in my town and another three or so I can think of just beyond it. They have a LOT of stores thanks to the mergers through the years. This company is made up of all of Babbages, Software Etc., Funcoland AND Electronics Boutique/EB Games.