Rent in Cities is simply too high for physical stores to compete against online only shops like amazon, it happened to PC Hardware selling shops, its happened to Gaming stores and a whole lot more, all you see anymore in European Cities is stores selling clothes for the female part of the population, opticians and mobile phone stores.
Well I won't miss their bricks and mortar stores...virtually no shelf space for pc games any more....however their online stores often had very good offers on games, it is generally my second port of call when browsing for bargains after Steam offers....I'll miss that.
High street wont exist in a couple of years, not as we used to know it anyway. Out of town stores and internet destroyed it - what do you expect? Thats capitalism - no place for sentiments here.
It will be a real shame if GAME et al dissapeared from the high street and I still believe that a high street game shop is still a viable business with some tweaks. The number of shops in some locations are silly, for example there are still 2 GAME shops in bluewater less than 100 feet from eachother. They could also do with looking at their pricing strategy, pre-owned games more expensive than new etc. They seem to be fully staffed at all hours of the day regardless of everyone being at work/school etc. I recently bought a kinnect in there (the wife really wanted it for her birthday) it was £79.99 compared to the HMV store less than 50 foot away which was selling it for £129.99, Asdas were not even able to match it who selling it online for £99.99. So they are not always the most expensive, my experience with some of their staff has also been very positive in relation to PC games. Their deal of the week is often good value as well.
I'm well unhappy now as i had pre-ordered Mass Effect 3 SE I don't recall getting an email about this either so thanks to you guys I found out, now I have to try to find somewhere that will stock it. I kept my order with game as I would get 7.07% cashback.
It is sort of sad, never purchased much from their stores, i used game online, and good old gameplay i have used them for years, gamestation i never purchased much from them online. It is never good for the consumer to remove choices, less competition.
I remember the days (back last millenium) when GAME actually sold board games, tabletop RPGs and related paraphernalia with computer games (mainly PC) occupying a mere 50% of the store. Now though, I'd agree with those who've pointed out their virtual abandonment of the PC market (though they're not the only high street chain to have done so) and as such, I can't really see their disappearance having a big impact. "Retail" nowadays comes down to online stores like Amazon or Play (every time I checked Game's website for something, it would show up as out of stock) and they are far better at dealing with the "long tail" of consumer demand than Game could ever be. There are a number of points in the article I would take issue with: This means that Game is able to charge publishers for shelf space and select items based on their profit margin, not their quality. It has the effect of locking out small publishers (unable to afford the "promotion fee") and restricting choice (business economics - it's cheaper for a store to sell 1,000 copies each of 30 games than 100 copies each of 300). How exactly does this benefit consumers? As a games player, I consider exclusives to be an abomination - it means dealing with one company, at the price it chooses and the terms it imposes. When GAME had an exclusive on a collector's edition, you could count on it being over-priced and of poorer quality (limited or reduced cost extras) than what was available elsewhere. If this practice ends, then good sodding riddance. GAME generally didn't compete on price so while its closure isn't going likely to make the market more competitive, it is far less likely to result in price rises also. High selling releases have always maintained a higher price, but as long as there is a steady inflow of new releases, older ones will continue to depreciate (sometimes precipitously) in value. This is downright silly - a "crap" game being promoted into the sales charts being considered a good thing? And for PC gamers, the days of "wide variety of choice" at GAME passed several years ago. As others have pointed out, the second-hand trade was hardly born of altruism on GAME's part and it has resulted in major publishers locking down their products with ever more offensive levels of online activation DRM. Not so - and Witcher 2's sales figures prove the point. Only 24% of its sales were digital. Retail isn't dead - it's the High Street that's dying.
i liked going in a wandering round a bit. Oh well, i`ve still got a paper Electronics Boutique loyalty card somewhere.....
Bit-Tech - you seriously need to do something about the tiny text font on your website. The year isn't 2004 anymore. It wouldn't hurt to increase the style by one or two points. Even with my glasses it is still annoying and irretating to read this article (I don't feel like 'zooming into' this webpage, in case you're wondering)
but gamestop over here across the water continues to roll over its competition (bestbuy, target, walmart). maybe they needed to change their purchasing model or something else in the structure of the company...
These shops are never going to be able to compete with the kind of prices the internet can offer but it's a still a great shame, at least they passed the time whilst the other half trailed round ANOTHER clothes shop for the millionth time..
5 years time and 90% of optical media will be dead. By this time, the majority of people will be able to download software faster than it can be read off an optical disc so what would be the need?
I had the Limited edition of Alan wake on pre-order - didnt arrive in my local store - spoke to customer services and was told that it had only just (on friday - release date!) arrive din their warehouse. i have ordered this on line - money has been taken from my account (showing as in stock on-line) - e-mail recvd confirming order - and today when showing something to someone about this version - it now says "out of sock" what the hell is going on!!!!!!
The main reason I continued to shop at GAME until recently was that they were able to secure exclusives on many limited or special editions as well as bonus dlc (even if it was only a skin pack or some additional guns) I agree with many of you that GAME effectively priced themselves out of the market when compared to popular online retailers and never seemed to give the customer service that warranted such a mark up. In my home town there as been a gradual reduction in the number of GAME and gamestation stores over the past couple of years, originally there was a gamestation and 2 GAME stores with one in the mall and another on the highstreet. Since then the GAME on the high street has been replaced with the gamestation and the GAME inside the mall has moved to a smaller size and reduced its stock. I'd better go cash in all my points and store credit now and pick up a SWTOR time card or something Anyways when are we going to see a chain of Bit-Tech gaming retail stores?
u cant run down to ur local online retailer to pick up that game u feel like playing u have to wait for the unreliable postie to bring it to ur door. game/gamestation is'nt going to diasapear due to not having 1 game on their shelves, if they've got finacial problem it aint due to 1 game. i stopped using game/gamestation when they stopped stocking pc titles(which they seem to have started stocking again), but console owners sure as hell are not going to stop using these shops when they want to get a game quick
As an ex-employee of Game I cannot understand this point of view. Game's policies for customer satisfaction were second to none. The customer was literally always right, to the point of enraging staff when horrible people got what they wanted (which there is a surprisingly high ratio of). It raised my expectations of how a business should treat its customers and I have yet to see a better service. Game also treated its staff very well, from day one. As for second hand games, Game makes next to no money on mint titles and absolutely zero on consoles, all its profits are primarily from its second hand games market; its accessory sales; and "white label" PC games. Game has never been unfair in pricing, nobody made millions from its shares, it has always been barely profitable. The reason they do not stock sell many PC games is because there were very few PC customers. Bottom line. PC games make the biggest mark up, even at their low prices! If Game could convince all their customers to turn to PC they would do so in an instant, Game didn't force consoles on people, the people chose consoles. With customers who can't fathom why PC games won't run for them simply because they've got "the Vista", its no surprise. Finally they are in no way surprised that they are losing their market share to digital distribution. When I started working there circa 2007, they were already preparing for the eventual move to D.D. Regards, a non-biased insider.
Thanks for your insight Rikalicious and welcome to the forums. However your post does seem to contain contradictions - if GAME make virtually no profit on console titles then why even bother stocking them? Regardless of customer numbers or demand, if a product isn't turning a profit then the desired sales volume is *zero*. And yet my experience and that of others has been that it was GAME that cut back on PC titles, which in turn has led to us buying elsewhere. Copy protection has to take part of the blame (before StarForce, I could buy any title confident that there would be a no-CD patch on GameCopyWorld to disable the disc check - afterwards, I had to check before each purchase, putting a stop to impulse buys) but your statement does seem to place the chicken before the egg. Heh - given the problems a previous generation of gamers had (editing autoexec.bat/config.sys files, troubleshooting IRQ/DMA/COM port conflicts, diagnosing sound/graphics card incompatibilities, setting up boot floppies) today's bunch have it easy. Of course, the only "console" around then was Nintendo's Game and Watch.
I think if a new up to date great console was released at a healthy price then their business would start looking brighter again, it's been left waaaaay too long & they also very much neglected PC gamers & relied too much on parents buying games as presents & also set up waaaaaay too many stores which should have a crazy load of overheads to pay for. But could just be the fact buying games from brick mortar stores has an inflated price tag compared to shopping around for the best price which anyone who doesn't like burning money does.
