biggest issue for any high street retailer is rents and rates, in edinburgh - the smallest (like newsagent) high street store is £120k / yr rent + £25k / year business rates, so 2x that for average Game store. Thats a lot of sales before you break even. High street rents havent dropped as online eats the market share. Soon high st = clothes,food,glasses,phones + cash converters and some charity shops
Shame there's people going to be out of work, and shame that there'll be some "fat cats" who'll be making money out of the situation. But... Goodbye and good riddance. Purely digital products have no business being sold in bricks and mortar stores, not in this day and age. Look what steam and Apple's app store has done for independent devs. And need I mention Minecraft? Stepping outside of the "normal" way of publishing and selling games is a step forwards.
True. But when I was a kid it was the 80's. There was no internet & TV advertising for games was much thinner than it is now. I also don't remember being able to play on consoles in store until I was pretty much a teenager, before that, at best, there'd be some machine connected to a TV behind the checkout & you could watch one of the store guys play something. I've got a nephew & friends with kids who are all starting to get into gaming & they go to shops to spend pocket money on whatever it is they already know they want, not to browse or talk to the staff. My nephew gets most of his gaming desire from TV or adverts in comics/magazines. But I agree that the actually going there to buy it & hold it in your hands part is essential to the magic of it as a child. No mainstream store would be bad, I just can't quite see that happening yet. Someone will fill the void.
I saw this coming a while ago. I have friends who work in several Gamestation stores and also Blockbusters, they have all been saying the same thing that the industry is moving on and their respective companies are not keeping up. Add to that the aggressive stance of companies like E.A and price fixing giants like Tesco and to a lesser extent HMV and you have a recipe for bankruptcy, Tesco think nothing of underpricing an item as they see it as a loss leader, and gain from all those other items you buy instore while you are there. What I fail to understand is:- In my area there was a Game and a Gamestation on all the local high streets. In my most local two the Games stores were always higher priced than the Gamestations and the local independent stores, they were never very busy, and hardly ever did late release day opening. So why when even according to the staff at both stores the local Gamestation out priced and out sold them on every line did the management see it as a great idea to close the Gamestation stores in favour of the Game stores, who are still over priced and mostly empty of customers. Having spent a lot of time working in Japan and Asia I cant understand why the secondhand exchange market doesn't "WORK" in the U.K. In Japan particularly there are hundreds of stores selling seconduser consoles P.C's and associated hardware and games, along side new items. Every launch day I was privy to saw people literally queing round the block at all the stores, big chains like Yodabashi, Softmap or otherwise small inde stores. Admittedly the prices were cheaper for secondhand stuff than compared to U.K but not by much than a few pounds pro rata. Recently Red Box acquired Blockbuster kiosks in the U.S, how long will it be until they set their sights on the U.K arm of the company ? Then set about closing off less profitable stores and replacing them with the unmanned kiosks. The future is inevitable which ever way you see it.
Bought Forza 4 in my local Game... more correctly, I pre-ordered the Limited Edition or whatever they were calling it - however only because nowhere else had the LE for sale. Otherwise, I probably wouldn't have bothered. However, my experiences at that time were very good - the staff were ready for a chat, polite and actually seemed to know what they were talking about (at least with respect to Forza 4) so I also took the opportunity to buy the PC Collectors Edition of Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine, which for some insane reason they were selling off cheaper than anywhere else had the 'normal' version. But walked past a few days ago and decided to impulse buy Battlefield 3... none of the staff were interested at all. They obviously knew what was coming and were more worried about what was going to happen to their jobs. Sad to see them go, in a way; before Steam came along, before Amazon and Play had made their mark in the e-tail sales sector... some of their post-Christmas sales were pretty good. Still remember getting three full-price, few week old games three-for-two and then getting 50% off on top of that.
I went into Game about three weeks ago to Pre-order the N7 PC edition of Mass Effect 3. I was told then that they didn't know how much it would cost, or even how much stock they would get, but that I could put my name on a waiting list. With the N7 edition not available elsewhere, I eventually bought it through Origin. I'd have preferred a hard copy but in the end Digital was just more convenient. In the long run, you have to see the next gen consoles going down a similar Steam/Origin route, where you register games to your PSN/Xbox Live account, which really will kill off video games at retail. Then you have the worrying situation of having a digital market place with no real-world competition and a monopoly on pricing. Which is not a good thing!
good.riddance. This will make no difference to the way the games industry is going, and to say you discovered video gaming because of game shows such an amazing miss-understanding of how the world works that it barely fathoms belief. bye bye game, sooner the better.
I bought BF3 from Game. It cost me £8 when I traded in GOW3. I'll miss deals like that but ultimately for most of my game purchases I go online.
I have never bought anything from Game and the last time I bought anything from Gamestation was 2006 (pre-Game). I buy everything from either Grainger Games or CEX.
Like so many other people here Game was where I started, fond memories of playing on the consoles at the back of their shops for hours. But the loss of sales by the slow suffocation of the PC section except for games like 'Bulldozer Simulator, or Train Simulator' has been Games own making. They used to be my go-to store but now unhelpful and unacknowledged staff make visiting with a question akin to pulling teeth- I highly doubt a single one of the staff in my local branch could even tell you who Nvidia are, and last time I asked a question on a game (to the supposed ' PC section specialist' he just picked up the box and tried to find it on the back. Not forgetting to add that the prices they think they can demand are legendary. Coupled with their slow adoption of the online market which is where it was forecast for the gaming sales market to go some years ago means in my opinion, Game have nailed themselves into their own coffin.
Always bought online from game as I love the collectors editions, made some savings with their reward system. Always liked their online presence as they were pretty good with prices. Anything I could get that wasnt collectors edition based though I usually went to steam though.
I bought BFBC2 from them (Game), they gave an excelent price at the time, and the package arrived in the release day (in Portugal), so I was very pleased with them. Too bad they are in trouble.
I often find myself perusing the pre-owned section in my local GAME - I don't think I've bought a PS3 game new. (Mirror's edge for £3? yes please) Whilst standing in the queue, half the people there are families buying Nintendo - Wii games and accessories. The 3 members of staff are always helpful and friendly to these people, and often give good advice and recommendations. It'll be a sad day if they do go down - I for one will have to take my business to CEX who are invariably a pound or two more expensive. I don't think it will drive Publishers to move into digital distribution - we're a comparitively small market compared to the US for instance, and they will still have plenty of physical stores, right?
The gaming world is going online.... downloading is the way forward. GAME and GAMESTATION are both very poor shops and expensive. One GAME shop attendant recently didn't even realise you could download games via their website... that says it all. Also the market that they rip people off on is the trade in but the developers have got smart and are introducing more and more network keys to play their game... thus making the 2nd Market less. Well done Developers. BTW - Do not ever download games from GAME.... its so slow!! Just so your aware, BF3 took 30mins from Origin. Mass Effect 2 from GAME took over 5hrs.... RIP GAME/GAMESTATION.... No one cares about them crumbling. Why should they, unless your unfortunate enough to work for them then its just another boarded up shop window.
I'm really not surprised. and I can't see them recovering anytime soon. For instance is anybody going to keep other preorder purchases with them at the moment or are they going to go with anybody else instead. as to Game having a better selection than supermarkets, maybe in the second hand section, but on the new release side my local GAME had less choice than the tiny ASDA near me, choice of top ten vs top 20. and when several of their 2nd hand games are still more expensive than new from online shops something is really wrong. GAME kept exhisting for several years by opening new stores and taking over or killing of the opposition, now the same thing is happening to them, and where as some high street retailers are now starting to realise that if you can't compete on the price front to online marketplaces you need to compete on offering good customer services, GAME constantly fails either through uninterested staff or bad management choices. So my local GAME has less choice than supermarkets, expensive new pricing, expensive 2nd hand pricing and poor customer service, yeah really suprised their in difficulty.
Half the problem is that why should I pay £30 for a secondhand game when I can buy it brand new for £35. Brand new no issues with possible scratches and missing instruction sheets or documents, versus all those as a possibility. Now if that game was £15 then maybe, you'd be more tempted. Admittedly I buy about 50% of my games for console and P.C second hand but I would buy more from retail if they were cheaper, after-all eBay is an excellent place to buy secondhand games and software.
Who cares the sooner game and gamestation go under the better they add nothing of value for gamers apart form overprice overcharge and understock and prices online will not g up as a result that's retarded since they are still competing with the other 100s of online retailers so goodbye game you wont be missed.
