Its a shame but to be honest based on my experience not surprising. I wanted to buy 3 copies of Mario Kart for the 3DS for my kids for Xmas and as it was released the beginning of December i thought i would make sure i got it , so i decided to go to Game and Pre-order the 3 copies. A week before the release i went to Game and When i spoke to the assistant he did not know how much it would be but he didnt think it would be any more than £34.99 so i decided to go ahead but then he asked if i had a game card , i didnt so he said i needed one to pre-order (even though i offered to pay a deposit of £90 (£30 Each) and that card would cost me £3. to which i thought i wont bother. in the end i got it a few days afterwards from Asda and paid £15 less for the three that Game were selling at. not a good way to run the Business to turn customers away like that and once you lose a customer then they are very unlikely to bother going back. To make it worse i wrote a mail to Game detailing this but i had no reply, so as i said not really surprising
I don't think you understand the system fully. Take for example car manufacturers, they make little to no money on cars, however, they make massive margins on replacement parts, basically all of their profits are made from replacement parts (watch "Who Killed the Electric Car"). If there were no cars on the road that needed replacement parts then they would be out of business by noon. Now if you read carefully you will see I said they made most of their profits from second hand games, if there were no second hand games for Game to buy then there would be no second hand games for Game to sell. In addition, if they left the selling of mint titles to their competitors then they would have closed back when they were Electronic Boutique. In my store we had a massive PC section, mainly because there were a few PC heads among the staff that did our best to keep it a great selection. We had a massively disproportionate amount of PC titles, and we had absolutely no competition for PC, all of our competitors had at best 1 bay for PC vs our 5+. People came from crazy distances to shop for PC games in our store but I don't think there was ever a week in my 2.5 years there when PC sales matched just one day of Xbox sales, and we had hugh competition for console games. Game doesn't care what it sells or to whom it sells it (bar age rated games), it is a publicly owned company, to suggest it stopped selling PC titles for any other reason than because they were not making money just makes no sense. I don't think I can explain this point much better without getting out the spreadsheets. As for the post about Asda, Asda is a subsidiary of Walmart, I personally don't know of any retailers in the world that can match the buying power of Walmart. The loyalty cards are just a system, compared to most other loyalty systems Games loyalty card has one of the biggest returns, 2.5% across the board and occasionally 5% on certain products. The redeemable store credit from the purchase of those 3 Mario games would have covered the cost of the card with some points left over. Anyway, as a side note, word from the inside is Game is going to fight this credit crunch to the last, after all its the employee's jobs that are on the line. There's nobody who can really benefit from cutting losses.
