Silent-Q.com

Gabe (of Penny-Arcade fame) posted a nice piece a couple of days ago about some of the shadier practices of GameStop. I had some recent personal experiences and wanted to expand on that a bit. If you haven’t read it, Gabe discusses how several GS managers have contacted him to let him know that they have a policy not to sell popular games on the day they release unless you have a pre-order. In other words, they’ll have more games than they have pre-orders for sitting in the store - they just won’t sell them to you.

Now I’m sure this isn’t true for every store, but the fact that any of them are doing it is disturbing enough. Just the other day, I stopped by my local GameStop to pre-order Assassin’s Creed: LE for the PS3. After a couple of minutes, the lady working there said that it wasn’t letting her place that pre-order. She suggested that they may have stopped taking them for the LE. The manager took a look, and he confirmed this is what has happened. I believe they were being honest with me, they always have - my issue here is a corporate issue. I thanked them & left. Once I was back at the office, I pulled up Amazon - who is still taking pre-orders for the LE - and placed my order. No hassle.

Now, does anyone want to take bets on whether or not the GS I was at gets more copies of the LE than they had pre-orders for? Because I will be surprised if they don’t. And what have they accomplished here? Have they taught me the lesson that I need to pre-order months in advance to make sure I get the game I want? Or have they taught me that shopping at other stores - in this case, Amazon - is not only easier & more convenient, but can guarantee I’ll get what I’m after without the run-around? I’ll let you decide which lesson I took away from it.

So the next question is, how does this possibly benefit them? I would propose to you that they really don’t CARE if I buy this game from them or not. I can see you scratching your head now - so let me explain. It has been widely reported that the profit margin on new games is very slim. Where they really make their money is on the sale of used games. From that point of view, why should they care who you buy the game from new? All that matters is who you trade it in to when you’re done - and since they’ve been buying up any and all competition that deals in used games, your options are drastically reduced in this regard. Pretty much, in my area at least, you either trade the game in to GS…or you trade/sell it online. That’s it.

I dream of starting my own game store - this is the same dream where I have won the lottery, so I don’t have to worry about being kicked out on the street if my store fails, mind you. In my store, I would take trades and give a reasonable amout for them. I would take condition into account when accepting trades, in an attempt to encourage people to keep their games complete & in good shape - because they would be worth more that way. I would carry game soundtracks & other related items. Basically, I would run a fair, gamer-friendly store that was a pleasure to shop in. One where you weren’t constantly being hounded to pre-order, or trade in. This store once existed around here, and it was called “Rhino”. I think I’d call mine “Gamers Utopia”.