News GAME Group shares suspended from trading

GAME Group has suspended its shares on the LSE as it struggles to find investment.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2012/03/21/game-shares-suspended/1

 

As bit-tech has said in other articles, it will negatively impact the gaming market to lose what is easily the biggest gaming retailer. Most supermarkets and other stores that do sell games usually only carry the top selling ones, and only ever in 360,PS3 and wii (no love for PC). I went down to my GAME store last week and the mood in there was horrible. Everyone in a daze, waiting for the inevitable "your out of a job, and we cant afford to pay your wages this month" letter from HQ.

Having worked in a GAMe a few years back, i can see where they were going wrong in places, but at the end of the day, the fact that you could always get it cheaper online (amazon, play, xbox live, steam etc) meant tech savvy people had no need to buy stuff from GAME. The store i worked in ran a loss in 9 months, broke even for October and made a profit in November and december. A business with many expensive retail outlets cant survive on 2 profitable months a year.

 

For once, I decided to buy BF3 brand new game from Game for the Physical Warfare pack. Not only did I have to go down to the store in person to pre-order it, I had to pay £5 deposit (which is fair enough) but they wouldn't tell me how much the game was going to cost on day of collection, you have to wait until day of release. The staff tell you you can always cancel your pre-order if you don't like the price, but if you have to wait until day of release, it's too late to get it elsewhere. Needless to say, it cost £10 more than anywhere else. I could have bought it on Origin and downloaded it for the same price without the ballache.

On the day of collection, they didn't have enough copies to meet all the pre-orders. I got the last copy of the limited edition in the store (the only version worth pre-ordering) at 12pm, so that the person behind me in the queue was screwed, even though they had paid their £5 to pre-order it. No wonder other games such as Mass Effect 3 weren't stocked (ignoring the finance issues) when they balls up the preorders so badly. Good riddance to shitty companies.

 

Exactly the same as in Basildon - they already had two GAME stores within 5 minutes walk of eachother, and once they acquired Gamestation, they kept that open too.

Because GAME and gamestation operated slightly differently, they could have kept one of each open, but instead chose to keep all three there? It may have been due to shop leases etc, but I'm sure that the period of time they kept all three open was longer than I'd expect leases to run?

 

If I'd known Game group were involved with the rothschilds I'd have boycotted them years ago. And lets not forget all the small independent gaming shops that have been forced out of business because of game group !

 

And there's little else in Bradford city centre, Gareth. I'd be amazed if any of the three survived a cull. The largest one used to have two floors, packed to the rafters with every format imaginable. They've closed off the top floor, and squeezed in the little stock they do have into one truncated room, usually only staffed by one - which is smaller than even the Halifax store.

 

Just found out Game Group is now officially in administration.

 

Trouble is that was only true for when they initialy got take over and about one year after that, in Edinburgh there's a Gamestation and game a couple hundred yards away, and the only difference now seems to be the colour of the carpet and price stickers. at least when game merged with EB they killed of some of the stores. In fact in Edinburgh they now have 6 stores in a about 5 mile radius. its a little much for a store that was apparently struggling so much.

 

In Belfast we had two Games and two Gamestations up until a few months ago. You could visit all four in no more than ten minutes of walking, the two Gamestations were literally at either end of one shopping centre. One of those closed a while back but that still leaves three...madness.

 

i viewed GAME as 'old retail' where you always pay full rrp - like dixons
gamestation had £5 off rrp so at least it was trying(i know same owner)
While GAME was much older etc, in my eyes, the gamestation brand holds a value but GAME is worthless.

 

It's certainly a cycle. We'll just have to see what happens now over the next month, who comes in, who buys what, whether HMV changes its mind and comes back to games but only online, etc. I'll have to look up the Rothschilds to see what that was all about.

At least it's happened and out in the open now, the fact that staff were learning more about what was going on from MCV/Gamesindustry.biz/news websites in general is disgusting treatment.

 

I'm so glad I didn't buy those Game shares 4-5 years ago.

 

In stockport, game and gamestation are next door to each other,now there's a good idea.

 

I feel really sorry for the staff that are probably going to lose their jobs, but the GAME group have had this coming for a long time, the whole group seems to have been run like it was somebody's hobby, with some seriously bad decisions made along the way.

 

So when do you think the larger discounts in store and stock sell off will happen?

 

This is the tip of a large ice-berg, I don't understand wtf bit-tech is doing screaming 'Game going out of business is bad for the games industry'

GAME was bad for the way the handled there business, and business is business, it will always evolve and develop.

In this case, the delivery platform may change, but the markets and products continue to EXPAND,not decline, as a result.

http://4.bp.blogspot.com/_I2uQkGxIykM/S5SK1p0LgJI/AAAAAAAAJb8/Jk2nNnzJl-s/s400/mega+fp+9gag.jpg

 

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