So yeah, Gamestop sucks

Kind of like, say, Steam, TotalGaming.Net, or Direct2Drive, you mean?[/quote]
Exactly, except charge Valve $5 for the pleasure of having EB’s blessing.

It happened here with Wind Waker - not enough games where sent into the country to fill pre-orders, although the distributors here are idiots.

Game stores here are now pushing the pre-order thing - I laughed out loud at the Gamesman guys when they said I might need to preorder Halo 2 if I wanted it on release day (it’s not like I want the collectors edition here). At least they’ll take pre-orders without requiring a deposit.

Kind of like, say, Steam, TotalGaming.Net, or Direct2Drive, you mean?[/quote]

Last time I looked, I couldn’t actually download a copy of Shen Megami Tensei Nocturne on either of those three. I could check again tonight if you’re saying I should though.

But assuming my entire game world is contained in the 50-ish games those services offer, you make a smashing point. (You did have a point somewhere, right? Something pithy and hip and very, very sarcastic?)

Crazy enough… a Best Buy in my area sold out… after I got the fourth to last copy! Though they’re getting another shioment in a couple days. This game is ver very popular. It must be highly sought after. Thats nice.

etc

Pithy, perhaps, but not sarcastic or hip – let me try again:

As you pointed out, the services I mention have very limited stock, that’s definitely true. However, if you want to play, say, CounterStrike Source, you can be up and running with Steam very, very quickly, and without leaving your chair.

IE, we actually have, today, multiple places to buy games with immediate direct-to-your-computer delivery. Which struck me as rather much like what you were referring to with your FTL delivery quip. Yes, you have to have a fast 'net connection, yes, many people still want physical media; however, direct selling content to the consumer is definitely not a shrinking trend.

I wouldn’t be at all surprised if the XBox3 or PS4 would allow you to buy and play games entirely over the net if you so choose (that said, I expect physical media will be an option in most instances for a long time to come – at least for another two or three (human) generations; I’ll wager that our children and grandchildren won’t find ownership of physical media anywhere near as important as we do currently).

As bandwidth becomes ever faster and cheaper, more and more purchases will be made (and delivered) online – which will make survival increasingly difficult for the likes of EB and Gamestop. IE, if they actually DID manage to develop FTL direct-to-customer delivery, unless they managed to be the sole, exclusive provider of such, it would put 'em out of business completely.

So, there you go. Apologies if I came off too wise-ass the first time out.

Pithy, perhaps, but not sarcastic or hip – let me try again:

So, there you go. Apologies if I came off too wise-ass the first time out.[/quote]

Actually, my fault entirely I think. Was expecting something in line with some of the other posts. This is more or less what Phantom is supposed to do.

I think the limiting factor is storage space. If I’m paying the same anyway, even with good bandwidth, it’s always going to be relatively slow to download a whole medium’s worth (these days that’d be a DVD over broadband, in the future a Blu-Ray over 5MB lines, maybe?)

What I’d love to see is this type of stuff combined with the ability for a reasonable fee to dash out to EB, have them (with a really fat pipe) connect to their centralized computer, download GTA5 on Blu-Ray, burn it for me, print out a full color manual and any inserts, slap it in a blank case they pull off the shelf, and let me walk out with something real in my hands.

There was a time when CDs were supposed to be sold this way, but it never caught on. I don’t know why, but it still strikes me as a very feasible sales model.

As for putting EB et. al. out of business, it depends on the model you look at. The above would work reasonably well if folks couldn’t download them into their home machines directly. (I think most people are glossing over the service aspect of EB type stores, probably because they don’t feel their local ones give them any. I can see how some EBs don’t provide service; mine does however. Conversely, I’ve never seen a Best Buy that provided the same level of service I can find at some EBs or Gamestops.)

On the other hand, if devs can cut out the publishing/shelf-space cycle successfully, EBs are screwed, as is the games section at Best Buy, and anywhere else that isn’t one’s living room. I’d be okay with that. It would assumably also bring about the ability to sample games before you buy and other such things too. The trick is that you need some form of high-performance broadband as the minimum for even the folks who are at Grandma’s in nowhere, Idaho, and have suddenly realized they’ve bought the wrong game for junior for Christmas. That’s quite a ways off.

I had pre-ordered GTA with EB but the shipment was late to my area of the country so all the stores got it late. EB said you can’t get it tonight you’ll have to wait until tomorrow. So I called Gamestop and they said they would be staying open late to sell it but you had to pre-order it. So I pre-ordered it about 2 hours before they got the copies and ended up getting it that night. EB lost my business on that one, I’ll just use the credit to get WoW and will probably shop at Gamestop in the future.

I honestly can’t believe someone would be upset because Gamestop isn’t willing to screw a customer who had pre-ordered. I think giving up a pre-order copy back on the shelf after a week would be reasonable, but 3 days? I think these people are more upset that they didn’t have the foresight to pre-order.

Er, the people who are faulting Gamestop et al for this are saying that they should order extra copies. I don’t think anyone wants them to shaft a genuine preorder customer.

Er, yes they do. To forfeit your pre-order if you haven’t picked it up by Wednesday seems unreasonable to me. If a store has copies that are not pre-orders they would sell them, any thing in the display case is a pre-order that hasn’t been picked up yet. It is better business to piss off a walk in customer that didn’t have the sense to pre-order that a pre-order customer who didn’t have the sense to pick up a game until 3+ days after the release.

But, see, there’s the hitch. There’s no reason to believe that EB actually has preorders for all of those copies. What’s more, there’s some reason to believe that EB would insist on sticking with pre-orders even when there are enough copies to go around. So selling Jason a copy would, in all likelihood, not impinge on anyone’s preorder at all. Except that, if they sell him a copy, they’re admitting to the public at large that maybe, just maybe, preorders aren’t necessary in the first place.

Er, yes they do. To forfeit your pre-order if you haven’t picked it up by Wednesday seems unreasonable to me. If a store has copies that are not pre-orders they would sell them, any thing in the display case is a pre-order that hasn’t been picked up yet. It is better business to piss off a walk in customer that didn’t have the sense to pre-order that a pre-order customer who didn’t have the sense to pick up a game until 3+ days after the release.[/quote]

OH YES, I WAS SAYING YOU FORFEIT YOUR COPY IF YOU DONT PICK IT UP WITHIN 3 DAYS!!! OH MAN, I SURE DID!!!

The point is that if you have a huge fucking stack of the game in the case and its been out for a few days, what that says is that isnt all pre-order. SOOOOO, problem solved. I went to Best Buy.

ARISE!

[quote]
The program, called “Circle of Life,” gives each GameStop store different percentage quotas for 1) pre-orders; 2) reward card subscriptions; 3) used game sales; and 4) game trade-ins. Each of these quotas is based on the store’s total transactions. Pre-orders and reward cards subscriptions are based on the number of transactions, while used game sales and trade-ins are based on the total dollar value of transactions. If a store’s quota for used game sales is 30%, and the store sells $1,000 worth of merchandise, GameStop expects at least $300 of that merchandise to be pre-owned.

So if someone walks into GameStop and picks up, say, a brand new copy of Yakuza 0 without 1) pre-ordering another game, 2) subscribing for a new rewards card, 3) buying a used game, or 4) trading in some games to help pay for it, then the transaction will knock down all four percentages.

The more new games an employee sells, the more used games they’ll have to sell to make up for it. In other words, according to salespeople speaking to Kotaku and elsewhere on the internet, GameStop is incentivizing employees to stop people from buying new games and hardware. GameStop staff say the company has threatened to fire people who don’t hit these quotas, which is leading to all sorts of scuzzy tactics.[/quote]

[quote]
But these numbers are often out of the staff’s control. During game launch events, for example, GameStop employees will usually sell nothing but new games, damaging their percentages and therefore lowering their COL scores.

“The other day working the RE7/Kingdom Hearts launch we were telling walk-in (non-reserve) customers that we didn’t have the games in stock or that they were only for pre-orders in order to not sell new copies of games,” said a GameStop employee. “It’s that bad.”

A second employee also said they found themselves in trouble after selling a bunch of new games last Tuesday, during the launch of Resident Evil 7, Kingdom Hearts 2.8, and Tales of Berseria. “Now I’m fucked for the week,” that employee said. “Now I have to sell way more pre-owned this week.”[/quote]

GameStop corporate says employees lying to customers to push used sales does not reflect their internal direction.

That’s absolute horseshit. Circle of Life has been a core philosophy of Gamestop for a long, long time, and I have explained it on here before. A key part of it is that new sales are important because it leads to trade-ins later on, which leads to more sales of NEW games (hence the circle).

This is pure, typical, Kotaku talking out of their asses bs.

Now, do I imagine there are crappy employees that don’t understand what they are doing? Of course there are. Like any other chain, any store is only as good as its management and employees.

I saw this yesterday and the follow-up today. I would never let some employee convince me to buy used if I don’t want to buy used. Then again, I’ve stepped foot in a Gamestop maybe twice in five years. When I was in there I saws some teenage exchange his old game for 75 cents. I almost purchased it from him for a dollar thinking… is there any game out there worth less than a dollar, maybe,

They always try to sell me something used when I am in there, but it never felt nefarious so much as an upsell requirement any place with front facing sales seems to have.

I’d be curious if some of the direction from this is at the management level… aka how wide spread is it or is it a few store or district managers? In comparison to something like what Wells Fargo did, the numbers were too high not to be corporate lead.

Well, it’s certainly generating value for someone, but I wouldn’t say it’s the customer.

It can, when done properly. But I had plenty of regulars who never bought used because having a sealed package was important to them.

Happy to discuss the particulars further.

Amazon offers pretty good prices for used games and accessories. I would love to see Gamestop go the way of the dodo. It’s a pretty shitty place to buy games.

Companies SlapBone would like to see go bankrupt tomorrow:

  1. Blockbuster
  2. That scamhole company making Star Citizen
  3. Gamestop
  4. ???

Amazon also has a set discount on new games if you have prime (20% I think?). That can be very handy.

I honestly think Gamestop will eventually go extinct as more and more sales move to digital download. Shame some of you folks never got to shop in my store back in the day. I’d have made believers out of you.

I think this is the correct assessment.

That said, I think any sales focused business needs to be vigilant when it comes to their incentive and metrics programs. Like the Wells Fargo issue, if you punish or reward people, they respond, and sometimes not in ways you intended.

Assuming Gamestop didn’t do their reseal thing. I stopped buying new from them for that reason alone… and only did one pre-order on the day of since.