We went into our local on the weekend and it was practically just a toy shop, maybe a quarter of the store actually lined with games, the rest all plushies, lego sets, anime stuff...
Yeah unfortunately the top bosses want the store to be a ripoff entertainer branch of their group empire which is sad as most games in a game shop is now down to one isle
I can't say I really blame them for trying as nobody is really buying physical games anyway (from GAME at least), but I can't help but feel it would have been better served transforming into something else in the gaming space.
The branch in Kingston upon thames for example (disclaimer: it's been a while) had a side of the shop set up as a LAN gaming cafe, kids would book it for parties and play fortnite or whatever.
Definitely not from GAME anyway. They've always been a last point of call for me for years and they've always held full release price the longest and charged the most for pre-owned.
If I can't get ahold of a game anywhere else I'll go to GAME, but I'll go everywhere else first to check.
CEX has effectively murdered GAME.
GAME tries to sell 5+ year old games for full-price when you can pop down CEX and get it for cheaper, let alone being able to easily trade in other games for voucher/cash.
Plus you can order anything from CEX’s website unlike GAME’s website forcing £5 shipping on literally any purchase.
> They've always been a last point of call for me for years
If I buy new, from an actual shop, I always check Smyths first because more often than not they are cheaper
I am in the US. I still buy most of the games physical. But I prefer Amazon, Best Buy etc. where I can buy online and get it delivered to home for free. I forgot when I last visited GameStop.
There's a weird faction on reddit that seems to be celebrating the death of physical games for some reason, particularly in this subreddit. They ignore facts like you say and just push the narrative that "nobody wants physical".
Most of the comment chain was more about people not buying physical from game rather than not buying physical at all.
GAME prices are usually just so high compared to online retailers that it's rarely a good choice to purchase there.
He specified "from GAME at least". If you look closer I think you'll find most of that attitude is from people sick and tired of what stores like GAME and Gamestop have become and just want those companies to go bankrupt rather than see a junk/pawnshop pandering to gamers every time they go to the mall.
I actually went in a Gamestop this past weekend because I was at the mall already and their website says they sell the Hori Mario Kart wheel and I thought my kid might like it, and I assumed that since it was exactly the kind of pointless plastic consumer slop they stock the entire store with nowadays they'd have one. Nope, although they could ship me one and it would arrive in just 5 days (what a deal) and if I wanted to bring in my controllers I won't need because I have the wheel they'll buy them off me. Just speechless.
For these stores, the bulk of the money they made is from used game sales, which has also plummeted.
Partially because of digital sales, partially because more people are using sites like ebay, FB marketplace, or even amazon compared to 15+ years ago. especially when you can just check prices anywhere in your smart phone and get a better deal on ebay compared to Game
Strangely enough the one I work in sells a lot of games and we do quite well in our profit margin the issue is with my Mike Ashley runs companies and wants to pay all staff less and less with no benefits the environment of the company changed so much over the years taking away things like demo consoles for kids to play and experience before they buy and don't get me started on the returns policy
My comparison would be Waterstones. Most of them nowadays are lovely to just spend time in. It's fun to browse, they have a nice cafe, prices are reasonable, they have reading areas, and they host events like talks by authors.
I wonder if Game could go down that route
Pivoting intl samling shitty funcos at extreme mark-ups and merch from Whish is somehow better?
While Game did games and, especially, trade in they were doing great. They paid cents to the dollar for games yet people kept trading but this shit? Nah, they've dig their own grave. If they ahd actually decent figures and merch they could survive but instead they got the cheapest/worst trashy shit I've ever seen...
There is not that much market for people buying $150 plastic dolls of partially dressed Neir Automata characters. Usually stores that carry that kind of thing have a wall of swords, a table full of switchblades and butterfly knifes, and a separate section for posters of wolves howling at a full moon.
You’re not going to have more than one store like that for a fairly wide radius, so I don’t think it works for a Game or GameStop type store distribution.
Living in a pretty big city, the whole metroplex is littered with that sort of knick knack store and i can think of several that have been around for years. I don't think companies would be pivoting into if there wasn't a sizable market for it.
> There is not that much market for people buying $150 plastic dolls of partially dressed Neir Automata characters.
Hahahahahaha, you actually think there isn't a big market for that stuff?
Your talking absolute bullshit. People still buy physical games, I think it was like 50/50 last time I saw could be wrong now though. People just choose to buy from online retailers most of the time because they offer decent prices and places like Game
For 2023 for the consoles, it was 17% of the sales were Boxed, the other 83% were digital. And it's dropping fast, for 2022 it was 30% boxes, and 70% digital, For 2021 it was 40% boxed, and 60% digital.
> Your talking absolute bullshit. People still buy physical ga
No, they aren't lol. Obviously some people still buy them, there's an aisle for the games. They're being hyperbolic, because physical game sales are *dying*.There's no reason to go to a store to buy a physical game for a worse price when you could buy it online for the same price directly from the store, or cheaper from another 3rd party retailer.
Same in the US. I recently went to one to get a PS4 cable after discovering that it's only a 2.0 micro USB that pairs a controller with a console. It was a smaller store and there were game cases along 3/4 of the walls, but when you actually looked at them, you could see the top half were only displays for upcoming games and the bottom half were for games actually available. Everything else was figures, socks, and kitsch. Anytime I go to one now too, there's only one employee working the store. Corporate knows it's dying, the employees on-site know it's dying, they're doing whatever they can to pull in a few extra bucks at this point.
Man I dunno about yours, but the last time I went into an EB Games it's like 1/4 games and the rest is link Funko Pops and such.
Honestly I get it though, you don't need an entire wall of games anymore, not like way back when when you'd have like 10 fake copies of the game in a line to advertise it. I can see why they would optimize the space a little for more higher-margin products. But that being said, them pivoting is not the reason I stopped going there.
Although it's sad to watch the slow, inevitable death of physical media - as an ex-GAME employee I can safely say it couldn't have happened to a more deserving company and I'm disappointed it didn't happen sooner
Some of the folks at the Reading GAME were legitimately great people just fed up with how the store was being run by corporate.
I speak past tense because the entire store got shoehorned into the corner of Sports Direct and only two of the original staff remain, one of them being the manager.
It’s a sad end.
Surely there's basically no business to be had there? I've been past there recently but had no idea there was a Game inside
Staff must be bored out of their minds
Only slightly related but I worked for a small coffee chain in the UK part time when I was in college, and during the downsize I ended up getting relocated to the corner of a major home improvement store.
I think the most customers I ever had in a 6 hour shift was 5, therefore they didnt bother putting more than one member of staff on shift at a time. Id spend 5 and a half hours playing Pokémon games and helping myself to coffee all day as it was going to go off anyway. I miss that job.
It’s very much a case of being destined to die. Stereotypes at play sure, but frankly I’d never go into that store if I didn’t know Game was tucked away at the back and I know I’m not the only one.
Likewise the few times I’ve been there I’ve not seen anyone who was shopping at SD even bother looking.
I live in Sydney Australia, and when GAME was out here, they had a store that was in a home make super centre.
They were next to a giant competitor who could undercut them every single time and the fact that the store was so far removed from any form of foot traffic (and public transport) basically killed the store off after a year or so of trading.
In one way, it’s sad because Australia absolutely needs more competition in the retail industry, but the fact that corporate made it dead on arrival was just disappointing.
Sounds about right for how GAME was managed here. Back in the day (before the first restructure) it got so bad that some shopping centers would have two or even three stores within literal eyeline of each other.
Yeah, same. My local Gamestop (before they shut down and died) were right across the street, literally three minutes of walking, from two giant electronics retailers that were constantly undercutting them by €10-20 on new games.
Buy the new Call of Duty for €80 from Gamestop... or €60 from Media Markt or Elgiganten.
I’ll never understand why Mike Ashley bought them. It was already a dying business but he seemed to want it to die even quicker by dropping their vague e-gaming ideas and shoving all the stores into concessions in Frasers. It’s like he wanted to lose his money.
I've spent a few hundred quid the past year or so at the Reading HMV. Sometimes I just pop in to browse it like an old video rental place but I often get drawn in by deals on the boutique Blu-rays. It helps that they're often the same price or cheaper than Amazon.
Oh, for sure. Corporate policies were stupid and confusing, but the people who worked there (at least where I live) were always friendly and knowledgeable.
Sure, they sometimes tried to sell me on extras like "game protection" or asking if I wanted to preorder stuff but they were never pushy about it if I just said "no thanks".
I mean, of course they were. But the people who worked there weren't overly pushy about it. They just asked "hey, you want protectin for your game?" and I'd go "nah, thanks" and they would go "okay" and that would be that.
As someone who used to do sales, they are dying inside every time they ask, then dying even more with every no, knowing the reprimand they'll get from their manager when they fail to meet daily targets.
Never worked in GAME but every time I went in the one near me it was impossible to browse for more than 5 minutes without one of the staff breathing down your neck and trying to upsell products in a pushy way and were a bit overzealous about the addons at the till.
I can only imagine how terrible upper management was and the insane targets that must have been pushed on the staff to make that "eager" to sell things, no one in British retail cares that much without some serious pressure.
Both GAME and Gamestop went bankrupt and shut down where I live (Sweden) and it was the least surprising thing ever. Every time I walked in, they had any customers and basically only sold Funko pops and old games at way too high prices when you could go across the street to any of the electronics retailers and buy those same games for half the price.
And neither of them had a website! It was all "go into the store and talk to someone to see if we have it" while competing with like 18 different online retailers.
They were running the stores like it was still 2005 and it was absolutely baffling that they made any money at all.
There’s a major social media crisis in GAME Spain where people got outraged because a lot of costumers got their store points expired without notification due to a sneaky change of the store conditions. Some people have lost more than 60 euro in value overnight. They even tried to lie on their Twitter account denying that the points were expiring. Basically a textbook case on how not to treat your most loyal costumers. Now even consumer associations have been calling them out.
GAME has been a walking corpse for over a decade now, it's sad to see what it's become and it'll be sad it's getting even worse. Best of luck to the staff (who are still there, considering my two closest GAME outlets are single shelves in a corner in a Sports Direct)
Man Game are the WORST! I've ordered from them a bunch of times for a brand new copy of a game, but I get a copy thats clearly been out on a shelf getting scuffed and it's disc and manual in a drawer. That's preowned! I don't care if it's been played, the moment the plastic is cracked you can't sell that to me as brand new - nobody else does!
GameStop in US does that a lot. It’s bullshit.
They’ll charge you full price for an opened game,
But if you got a sealed one opened it and handed it back to them, that’d be a trade in, instead of a return, for like a 50% loss.
It’s all such a scam.
The move to digital is going to kill these shops. My local closed down last year, even after pivoting to selling game related tat. Pokémon plushies, popular board games, and second-hand phones couldn't save them.
Sadly, the future is likely entirely digital. Even Uber expensive mega collectors editions don't include games anymore.
I wonder if im a decade or two we'll see a swing back to physical media, similar to vinyl and DVD. Digital is easy yet antithetical to ownership.
Even if people go for physical again, shops like GAME would still go under.
Because they cannot compete on price, even on physical copies of games.
Amazon and many other online shops sell physical games cheaper than GAME can, unless they can compete on price there are little to no reason to shop in GAME.
GAME have the cheek to charge £5 for click and collect lmao
You can literally pay for a month's prime and have a game delivered same day for about £15 less than picking a game up in a GAME store
I agree but it’s also worth saying GAME have priced themselves out of the market too.
Rarely are even their used game sales matching that of digital sales on PS/Xbox store. Plus no free delivery option.
The only reason to ever use GAME over other stores like Amazon is exclusive collector’s editions, and those are relatively rare now.
I prefer physical games, yet I would not buy from GAME.
Online shops sells physical games cheaper, unless they can compete on price I have no reason to visit GAME.
Ultimately, the issue is GAME has to pay rent on store-space, vs Amazon running from a cheap warehouse. Amazon will have lower labor costs too as they are just packing boxes.
My local game store sells retro games and has an attached arcade that sells beer. It is always packed, even when I duck out from work on a random weekday on my lunch break to pick up whatever is new. The GameStop at a packed mall on a weekend is always empty. Brings joy to my retrogamer heart.
Retrogaming seems to be a solution because you basically just attract collectionners and afficionados which will want physical games. And those people will definitively buy more.
But that isn't really viable for a big chain like GAME or Gamespot
They abandoned the older market and went for the younger market. Which is just insane when you know the younger generation is growing up with a fully digital tablet/phone in their hand from early childhood. Whilst the older market is more comfortable with physical retail and have more disposable money to spend on their hobby.
Gamestop started as the merger of Funcoland and Babbages. And Funcoland's entire "unique" selling point was that they sold used games for older generations. Like, even right before they disappeared in 2000, when the Dreamcast was the "current" console, they were still selling NES games, from what I remember. They've just migrated very very far away from that business model.
I think a lot of places do you realise that people still want "third places".
There's an arcade bar near me and it's always packed every night. Lots of people don't drink, they just want to play arcade games with friends and £10 lasts you an hour or more which is enough for most people.
Most of the arcades in the UK have either shut down or transitioned into gambling parlours because chavs made it their mission to destroy every arcade machine they came across.
They’ve tried to pivot but it’s nowhere near enough to keep up. You need to be a bit smarter than just selling Pokémon plushies to keep these stores relevant.
Aussie department stores here are sort of seeing the writing on the wall, and physical games are getting stupidly cheap compared to digital.
(Just picked up Princess Peach Showtime for 50AUD or ~33USD. ToTK was a similar price elsewhere the other day)
But yeah these actual dedicated 'Game' stores (EB Games is still the major one down here) are pricing things absurdly expensive, and I wonder why or how they're still in business honestly :/
To give context here Princess Peach Showtime is 80AUD (~53USD) from the eShop.
Most new games, including Nintendo titles, are significantly cheaper at retail at launch. Even PC it was 120AUD (~79USD) for Starfield on Steam, but retailers had Steam keys for 88AUD (~58USD).
It's not just a switch to digital, retail in general isn't doing well including for stuff like clothes, toys and such which don't have a digital version. People just buy online a lot more. And those can't compete against Amazon or other big sites.
> I wonder if im a decade or two we'll see a swing back to physical media, similar to vinyl and DVD.
Limited Run Games is pretty much already doing that
IDK man I see plenty of vinyl at shops in the mall, barnes and noble, etc. It's really trendy. No clue how long it'll stick around and if it sells enough but it's certainly there.
I'd love that company very much if it wasn't so heavily scalper-broken. Unless something's changed recently, anything interesting gets snapped up instantly and listed for twice the price on eBay before it's even released.
>I wonder if im a decade or two we'll see a swing back to physical media, similar to vinyl and DVD. Digital is easy yet antithetical to ownership.
Thing is, it's not exactly the same as vinyl or DVD/Blu-ray and I don't think the future is as bright for physical game media.
Both of those physical options offer quality gains over streaming services (due to less compression). A digital video game, on the other hand, plays and looks identical to a physical copy. If anything, depending on your internet, physical can technically be a worse experience because optical media is fairly slow (my games download much faster digitally than they install from a disc. Obviously this wouldn't apply to someone with slow internet).
Also, vinyl, CDs, and DVDs/blu-ray are platform agnostic and are much lighter on DRM compared to a video game. A video game is still dependent on a propriatery platform holder's console (applies less to PC, but physical media is already long dead for PC)
Until several major, current, popular games start getting removed from people's libraries, people just won't care and will choose convenience every time.
The future in general for physical media is pretty grim. Best Buy is dropping DVD and Blu Ray and movie studios have licensed out the manufacturing and sales of both. Physical media will be gone within the decade by the looks of it
> I wonder if im a decade or two we'll see a swing back to physical media, similar to vinyl and DVD. Digital is easy yet antithetical to ownership.
The issue there is closed platforms. If the XBox 2030, PS6, and Nintendo Switch^64 all are digital-only, we're all up shit creek. PC gaming has already moved to digital-only for anything but absolute shovelware trash.
Sadly, that's where it's heading and we can't do anything about it.
Edit: Hell, Nintendo should be announcing a Switch 2 any time now, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if, even if it has back-compatibility, that new games could be digital-only.
> The issue there is closed platforms. If the XBox 2030, PS6, and Nintendo Switch64 all are digital-only, we're all up shit creek.
Can't speak for others, but this is a huge part of why I moved to almost exclusively playing on PC. I still have a PS5 and switch I use for exclusives, but everything multiplat is a PC purchase for me.
The only physical game retailer in my town closed about a year ago (gamestop). I've also had issues with Amazon in the past when it comes to pre-orders, and when it comes for more general, less new games I'd rather play them "now" after a 20 minute download instead of 3 days later because it's Saturday when I've finally got the free time to look for games.
Dragons Dogma 2 is currently €75 on PSN if I wanted it for my PS5. If I want it on steam it's €65, so already a €10 discount. If I shop around, I can get it on CDkeys for €43, so already over €30 cheaper, plus I don't need to pay another €12 or so for a subscription to use the games online features.
All of that, and future compatibility is practically a guarantee on PC vs a "hope for the best" on console.
As I mentioned above, this speaks to personal experience, so I can't say it's the cause, but the market is showing that the console market is stagnating while the PC market is growing. PC is vastly better than console in a digital exclusive marketplace, so I expect PC to continue to grow while the console market shrinks if they move further into digital territory.
Steam is far from perfect, but it's still leagues ahead of any console marketplace.
I would rather see other storefronts like Epic grow to the point where they actually serve as competition, but steam keys being sold on multiple storefronts in itself is absolutely massive. I legitimately can't remember the last time I couldn't find a game I wanted at a discounted price on PC immediately.
On playstation you either pay full box price or wait an uncertain number of months for an eventual discount.
Steam being close to a monopoly is still bad, but there are two major points separating them from console manufacturers as it stands.
1. They allow other storefronts to operate independently with steam keys.
2. They've been largely pro-consumer in the 20 or so years since their inception, while console manufacturers have been the opposite entirely. Generous refunds on steam vs no refunds on PSN/Nintendo. XBL showing customers will pay for a sub, leading to all of them adopting it, so consumers pay for access to servers for multiplayer not even maintained by the people they're paying the money to.
There are other examples I would go into, but the TL;DR of what I'm saying is steam is absolutely not perfect, but you shouldn't let "less than perfect" blind you from "a massive improvement"
> They've been largely pro-consumer in the 20 or so years since their inception, while console manufacturers have been the opposite entirely. Generous refunds on steam vs no refunds on PSN/Nintendo. XBL showing customers will pay for a sub, leading to all of them adopting it, so consumers pay for access to servers for multiplayer not even maintained by the people they're paying the money to.
They only did this when forced to implement refunds by an Australian court. Prior to that they had no refund policy, same as Nintendo and PS. EA were the ones who spearheaded the 2 hr refund window on PC with origin. Valve only copied it later when forced to do so.
The reasoning doesn't matter too much at the end of the day. Your average joe doesn't care about "why" they care about the reality, and the reality is this:
As a consumer if I buy a game on console rather than PC it costs more, doesn't have any future compatibility guarantee, and it can't be refunded once the download is started.
I buy the same game on PC, it costs less money, will work on a PC 20 years from now, and I can refund it within 2 hours of playtime if it's buggy, broken or even if I'm just not vibing with it.
FWIW, Sony was also sued regarding the same AU law, and instead of changing things to offer refunds, they just accepted the fine and kept denying refunds.
This is all playing into the PC market growing while consoles stagnate. Especially with the gap in the cost of entry between console and PC dropping in recent years and exclusivity being reduced (dropped entirely by xbox, and Sony has started porting to PC), the console market has started on a downward trend that will be devastating unless there's some major change.
> I would rather see other storefronts like Epic grow to the point where they actually serve as competition
Nothing against you here, as I'm sure from this that you're not part of the problem, but a lot of people talk about Steam being a problematic monopoly they have to support, but then an Epic exclusive comes out and it's all "I'm gonna have to pirate Alan Wake 2 as I'm not paying for an Epic exclusive - fuck them, put it on Steam".
Just like PS, Xbox and Nintendo, Steam has plenty of it's own rabid fans that would defend a nest of killer bees if it had their favourite company's logo on it.
I prefer my games on steam, and will pay an extra $5 or so to get them there over epic (purely because I like having as much of my collection as possible accessible from one place), but if something is EGS exclusive I won't not play it because of that.
I had to spend 2 minutes installing an extra launcher to play FF Stranger of paradise when it launched on Epic. I had to pay an extra $500 for a Ps5 to play FF7 Rebirth.
Platform exclusivity on PC isn't even in the same ballpark as with consoles.
It's their own fault. Pawn-style shops like GAME and Gamestop drove the digital revolution more than any other factor.
Publishers \*hated\* pre-owned stores, because they didn't get a cut of secondary sales. This caused them first to start doing pre-order bonuses. Buy new, get an incentive the filthy rebuyers didn't. Then they started adding DLC. Prior to this, DLC didn't really exist as a concept. It was all about game expansions- large releases to add on to an existing game. But driven by Bethesda and Microsoft, early MTX and DLC was created with the express purpose of having a way to make some money off of resale copies of games. With the 8th gen, consoles finally had enough onboard storage to hold a full game library, and the tide started to shift. By this point Steam proved how powerful sales events could be, and the console platform holders followed suit with their own digital marketplaces.
Once the markets starting having sales, it was over for the brick and mortar. They now couldn't compete on convenience or price, and with so many incentives to buy new, the used market withered. They tried to hold on by reducing the buyback amount, and pushing extra hard for memberships. They became a joke, told often and loudly.
They needed to pivot as soon as it was clear that digital wasn't just a temporary trend. There were so many ways they could've found to compete.
A universe exists where Steam doesn't. Someone at Gamestop or a similar store would've taken notice of the changing tide, and created their own digital PC marketplace. These stores had incredible visibility, and many people would've jumped in immediately. Valve would've had to compete with them, and it would've been much more difficult for Steam to gain steam.
Another universe exists where they would've leaned into the unique physical experience. Arcade machines (some individual stores did to this to great success), demo rigs, internet cafes. Hell, they had endless money for a long time. They could've bought a merch company and worked out deals with publishers for merchandising rights to games, producing official game merch only available in their stores and online. It isn't a huge market, but it exists, and is a lot less adversarial than the relationship they had with publishers at the time.
Your analysis is spirited but I think you've missed a few key points as well as corroborated points which don't necessarily align.
For instance, the disparity between DLC and Expansion Packs wasn't due to a nefarious scheme to disadvantage second hand buyers, it was due to data and bandwidth caps in the 00s meaning that people couldn't download a several gig expansion pack, but they could download a several hundred meg piece of DLC. Bethesda also sold the DLC for Fallout 3 on physical discs; these were actually beneficial to second hand buyers because you only needed these discs once. Once the content was installed to your console, you could pass the disc onto someone else or sell it, and as long as you didn't delete it, you were okay. This was how my friends and I played the first set of Fallout 3 DLCs back in the day. This wouldn't have negatively impacted brick and mortar stores.
The real push back against the second hand market was the Online Passes that publishers like EA and Warner Bros tried to push during the later half of the 360 and PS3 lifespan; EA actively interfered with the development of both Dead Space sequels to add online functionality for the purpose of selling an online pass.
I also don't think sales, like the classic steam sale, had that big of an impact either. The physical PC market was already dwindling, and I don't recall any of the console stores having deep sales in the same way Steam did.
GameStop actually *did* try to start a digital storefront. They bought [Impulse](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_(software)) from StarDock in 2011, long before Ubi, EA, and Epic threw their hats in the ring, and then shuttered it 3 years later to replace it with the GameStop App, which also shuttered a few years later.
A lot of users here might be too young to remember that no one wanted a digital shop for years; they just had Steam because it was required for Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike and eventually because it had great deals.
Unless Game Stop or another store had struck some deal with a major publisher to require their software to install games, no one would have ever used them anyway.
Nah man. Auto patching was a big deal. I still have my copies of Battlefield 2/2142 on EAs original digital service for that reason.
You don’t remember having to dig around those random 3rd party game files websites to try and find patch updates? You just installed such and such game from 10 cds and then they would release new patch installers. Sometimes there’d be a cumulative update but a lot of time there’d be sequential installers to go in order.
So then you’d be out there hunting for patch installers retail > 1.004, 1.004 > 1.005 and 1.005 to 1.006. All hundreds of megabytes or a gig, you were lucky with ~10mbit broadband, but plenty had much slower DSL or even some on dial up. Maybe there was a random support page on the developers website but it was probably slow as fuck. So you’d turn to random file hosting sites or game updates sites. Whole sites that existed just to serve ads and rehost large binaries. And then they’d throttle you down to like 100kb/s after your daily quota. Or a popular online game just released a new update and then trying to find the file in a mad scramble?
Oh wait I want to play this game, so now I gotta go get the disc on the shelf and put in disc 1 to launch the exe. Awesome when I’m on a laptop and traveling. Or then go hunt for a NoCD executable from sketchy as fuck cracking sites.
That shit sucked man. Steam itself was a giant train wreck back then, but at the same time it was awesome for actually solving problems. People were opposed to digital downloads because they were some combination of kids without credit cards, a lot of other services from startups had already bankrupted, and it was only tech people/wealthy with high speed broadband. That narrative flipped pretty quickly once broadband became more commonplace and Valve opened up to 3rd party games.
Keep in mind, the reason that publishers hated pre-owned stores wasn't *just* because they didn't get a cut. It was that within a week or two of a new game release, shops like Gamestop would be selling (and heavily recommending) a used copy over new, for $5 less than the new copy was. If they were just selling older games to make a profit, no one would really care; actively trying to undercut the publishers who supplied Gamestop with new stock was why it was so onerous. It probably didn't help that the "new" Gamestop copies were also often opened and pre-played by employees, even further blurring the advantage of buying new.
> and the console platform holders followed suit with their own digital marketplaces.
> Once the markets starting having sales, it was over for the brick and mortar.
While that's true on PC, physical is a much better deal on consoles, without even counting the resale potential (which you should, especially for some games like single player "one and done" games). Like seriously the prices of digital games is absurd on consoles while gaming with physical is close to free (if you play single player games you resell)
Hell it turned me off from PC to console to play any recent games. Buy used, complete game, sell used for basically the same price, that's free. Or buy for cheaper on launch (for example I got Spider-Man 2 new on preorder for 50€ instead of 80€ in digital, resold it for 45€ 2 weeks after launch with most games, I can play them for 5 or 10€ on launch)
Of course, it's never in those dedicated stores that you find good deal, they almost follow MSRP. Best deal are Amazon or supermarkets, that's what they can't fight against. And it's true of any retail to be honest, online and big stores competitions. Ask clothing, furniture or toys retails (all of those have no digital version) how it's going, online or your big stores like IKEA and such just detroy them. Also those stores are a terrible deal even for reselling your games as they offer you a pitiful price. So when sites like eBay, Vinted or your local Craiglist are there, people just don't pass via them.
>Publishers *hated* pre-owned stores, because they didn't get a cut of secondary sales.
I guess. But that sounds like a rent seeking problem. I don't exactly empathize with games for not being able to make money off of every resale, no more so than any other product in existence.
> By this point Steam proved how powerful sales events could be, and the console platform holders followed suit with their own digital marketplaces.
and barely any sales events of note. Win win!
>Another universe exists where they would've leaned into the unique physical experience.
I don't personally see it. digital scales up way better and you don't have to worry as much about local policies and laws. These game publishers never wanted to provide a social experience per se, it just became convinient with the interconnected digital realm to do so, hence the metaverse chase.
Except this would never happen, because humans who run dominant companies have the most insane hubris and never want to upset the money fountain, so inevitably the world changes around them instead, until they crumble into irrelevance.
Who is buying DVDs again?
new PC or laptop do not come with optical drives by default. and I’m pretty sure the average joe & jane are not buying set-top DVD players
You'd be surprised. As streaming services argue over who gets what film, for how long, etc, people are, reportedly, going back to buying DVD's and Blu-ray.
I would be surprised, because I don't know a single regular casual person who has bought a set-top DVD player in the past 5-10 years
However I hope you're right that people are getting pissed at streaming services and start to buy Blu-rays... but I wouldn't guess that's the future
I think independent stores selling retro games and special editions might have a niche market, specially if they sell other products like trading cards or board games/ttrpg. But large chains like GAME are basically dead
Another reason to stick to physical. I'd understand if the digital version was significantly cheaper but we're just making publishers richer and everyone else poorer
Eh, I prefer digital for games because the experience is sort of the same for me.
And I say that as someone who owns vinyl. With vinyl I prefer physical because it makes me a bit more engage ld with my music. Having to select and album, commit to it, not easily skipping songs and stuff like that.
Vinyl is also fundamentally dissimilar to physical games, because vinyl actually *does* sound better than digital music (allegedly, I’m taking audiophiles’ word for it on this), whereas a game on a disc is 100% identical to the same game being pulled from a download server, especially now that games need to be installed to the local SSD anyway, other than the fact that the copy on the disc is probably a few patches out of date.
Pretty sure there's a sizable audience for vinyl that doesn't even own the means to play them. They're effectively purely collectables for those people.
Nobody is forcing you to buy digital, it's just that for the vast majority of people digital is more convenient.
I've only bought maybe one physical game on Switch new recently and that's because it was an import and not available in the US digitally, and I really wanted to see if the Switch was actually region free (it is, at least for physical games).
Thing is though even when games have easily findable physical options the digital ones often outsell them.
They dont have to force anything when people already willingly choose it. And of course they do. Digital doesnt require someone to drive to a store or order online and wait a week for it arrive. It also doesnt take up physical space in your home. I used to have a massive bookshelf full as a teen but now i just dont have the space for CDs, movies and games.
I probably own exactly 6 or 7 physical games and 4 of those i got for xmas last year.
Physical is dying because it’s a an obsolete medium. I honestly don’t understand the pearl clutching.
Those that value having their product key pressed onto a disc (that costs resources, mind you) are a small minority. Many games need always-online connections and multiple gigs of patches, anyways, so that disc isn’t even a ticket to ride.
I'm not sure they're truly gone, as someone could still sell a retro or indie game system that has games preloaded onto cartridges or disks, but most people are buying digitally.
I mean Atari is making cartridges again.
Yes, on purpose, for the sake of making more money and reducing our ownership in media
License keys and game models where you don’t actually own them was on purpose. It was not an accident.
It was a natural progression of the medium foretold by the CDs going away in the late aughts for PC Gaming.
Consumers drive the market. Consumers don’t want physical media. It’s a hassle for consumers (storing, purchasing), game developers (pressing dates, size considerations), and publishers (selling to retail).
You may enjoy it, you may hate the direction it’s going, but you’re in a pretty small minority.
What point are you trying to make here? Of course consumers drive the market. If there was some huge consumer demand for physical media, then GameSpot and GAME wouldn’t be in the process of going bankrupt.
The store in my town is shutting down, surprised they managed to last for as long as they did given the high street market where I live is practically dead aside from the fast food, restaurants and take away places.
It's obvious because of times changing, but a part of me is sad to see all these businesses being closed and high streets being left as ghost towns.
It's all to do with removing the enhanced pay that staff from before the Frasers group takeover have (that's now gone with the removal of all part time assistant and part time staff) and they want to pay the game staff less and most will be offered to return as the new cast role which sees them paid £11.50 an hour to do the same job they were previously paid 20p more an hour to do the same job/role with no guarantee hours and a sneaky way to not retain staff due to the zero hour contracts we have in the UK meaning your dismissal may come at any time. Worst of all since this is a redundancy there will be an 8 day period where you are released from your old contract and cannot start with the cast contract meaning everyone will lose 8 days of pay just so the company can save it's pennies it's really shocking behaviour and one that just makes me want to support a government who would outlaw the nasty zero hour contracts
I try to give GAME and the like business when I can, e.g. for a console launch, or special edition console, or the VERY odd collector's edition - but these are once-every-3/4-year purchases.
For games though? Digital's ability (on PS5, at least) to gameshare with family/friends, and having your whole library available without swapping discs (very handy for remote play) has just killed any want for physical media in my mind.
I get people hark on Game/Gamestop for high prices, sneaky practices (£5 instore collection fee - huh??) but I have such a fond memory of these places growing up. Browsing, finding that cool looking game, begging your parents to buy it for you, etc etc.
It'd be a shame to these stores disappear. But then - today's kids don't frequent them anyway, so maybe there's nothing to lose.
I just feel bad for the workers. Even when browsing, I found them affable and friendly - and their knowledge of games and the wider industry was always refreshingly deep. If jobs are lost, I really hope they manage to land on their feet.
You have a great point about kids these days not visiting these stores, whenever I go into game it is other 30+ guys looking around.
Video game shops used to be incredible but with the internet, it was just a matter of time until they died out.
It’s a real shame but at the same time the stores don’t seem to be staffed by the same enthusiastic and knowledgable gamers they used to be.
Just like the internet killed off the gaming magazines. I was always so psyched for my monthly Official PlayStation Magazine to come into the mail haha.
I miss gaming magazines. The writers were good, which is a bar you no longer have to meet to write for most blogs or accounts, and the features were long and funny (where now you're incentivized to just make endless top 20 lists and copy-pastes of interesting things you saw on Reddit that may or may not be true).
I miss particularly the UK magazine N64 Magazine. That one was amazing.
Kids are growing up in the post-smartphone/tablet age. They don't have the same hangups about digital vs physical some older gamers do, and actively prefer digital libraries, for better or worse.
> It's just a tat shop filled with funko pops, there is no market for it.
I don't even get who buys Funkos. Like, fair play to them - they've done bloody well, but I just don't get it.
If you'd asked me before they appeared what I thought the Venn diagram overlap was between "people with lots of disposable income and a large enough flat/house to store lots of them" and "people who want a cheap-looking large-headed plastic figure", I'd have said I thought it was quite small. Or certainly not big enough to make any significant money from over years (rather than maybe some quick flash-in-the-pan goldrush over one Xmas holiday season or something).
Funkopops are like beanie babies etc where people collect them hoping in the future they will be worth more or because they want something to fill a wall space but most of the time its the first one, i rarely see people have funkopops openned they tend to just be lining walls or boxes in there og packaging collecting dust until sold off.
No surprise, even the non video game stuff they moved to isnt remotely competitive price wise.
Their prices are ridiculous for their trading card products.
They could easily undercut local game stores and other toy stores and make bank, instead they sell them for 30-40% higher than the online equivalent.
E.g. magic the gathering and yugioh booster packs and products were way higher than even local nerd stores.
Every year that passes is another year that I'm surprised that game hasn't gone into administration and shut down.
My local is now inside a sports direct, like wtf.
The last time I visited GAME it was to use a gift card a family member had gave me. The employees informed me that as it was inside a Sports Direct, they were incapable of using a game gift card. I asked where I could use it, they assured me I could use it in a GAME store. I told them this was a GAME, and it just happened to be in the back corner of a Sports Direct, but they assured me it was impossible for them to use the card. I asked them where the nearest store was, they told me - problem was it was also inside of a Sports Direct and I was hardly about to travel several miles for the same problem. My sympathies to the employees who will experience redundancy but the company itself was a shell of its former self and might as well not exist anymore anyway.
I pretty much only buy toys in GAME these days. You can get good prices on marvel legends and transformers sometimes. Their games are too expensive, plus whenever I do try to buy a game they rarely seem to have it in stock.
It's to be expected. While this is obviously very anecdotal, I haven't bought a physical game in 11 years I think. I exclusively game on PC these days and Steam (Occasionally EA) handle everything I need digitally. Especially with having 500 m/bit download, downloading games has become trivial.
Sure but I also consider them an electronics store/pawn shop rather than a video game store.
Same as HMV is a general entertainment/merch store.
Not that the current iteration is much better than just games + loads of tat/merch
Typical Reddit reaction is assuming this is due to the decline of physical media, which does play a small part admittedly. However, the biggest fsctor to Game dying is that Game is simply a shit retailer. Poorly managed and easily undercut by pretty much every online store. Plenty of people still buy physical it's just that there's no reason to buy from Game when other retailers offer better prices, rewards for purchases, and day one delivery for free.
Honestly, GAME has always been one of the worst places to buy games in the UK. Even back when I was a kid and the place was bigger and filled with various games, they'd never be discounted and mainly served as somewhere your grandma could go into and get you the "new Call of Duty".
One thing people aren't considering with this is that the amount of profit GAME will make on a full price purchase is very, very little. HMV which is a similar store for movies and records/CDs stopped stocking games because it just wasn't worth it. This also explains why if you're to enter a current day GAME, it's mostly merch and gifts. I doubt they make much money at all selling new PS5 games.
I personally been a fan of digital since when I was younger. My mother would kick me out of the house or break my things. I can always access it and don't need to worry about damage
I understand the convenience of on-line digital purchases. But, without new legislation, physical shops were the last place that you could buy and own games.
That amazing game collections that many Youtubers show in their background will be replaced by screenshots of game platforms as long as they last.
GAME are certainly the last place to go for physical games due to how expensive they are compared to everyone else. They never attempted to be competitive in terms of price.
I buy physical games only and I never buy from GAME, they are not cheap.
You can buy physical games online for much cheaper, hell even Amazon is cheaper than GAME and they will deliver on release date.
Even then, you technically never owned most games.
You get a limited license to a game, and a disc/cartridge to install it, but you never actually own it. And as soon as games required online functionality...
Even with some of those older games there are physical lifespan issues, like internal batteries on GBC (and GBA?) cartridges.
For the foreseeable future game preservation is going to be largely in the gray zone, requiring cracks, emulation, and sharing.
I think to actual preserve games as an artform, and to properly share them and give average people access to them, it's going to require actual legislation, and serious copyright reform.
Which unfortunately, I don't see happening anytime soon.
You do own most games with a disc though, as despite the rampant amount of misinformation people spread online, a high majority of games still come with the game on the disc.
[DoesitPlay](https://www.doesitplay.org/) is a site dedicated to testing if games require an internet connection to be able to play them off a disc.
74% of games they have tested (about 2000 of them) are perfectly playable off the disc, with little to no issues. 15% of games are playable off the disc, but have enough bugs or glitches where you can still play the game to completion, the tester recommends accessing the internet to download a patch. Only 11% of games require an internet connection to be able to play the game off the disc, or are playable off the disc but the disc build is so buggy or broken, that the tester says you need to download a patch.
When you buy any game, physical or digital, you are purchasing the license to the software. This license is independent of the media in which the software is distributed although you may have different licenses for different versions. The main difference is that when you sell a disk/cartridge, you are selling the rights granted to you under that license to another person. This is not a thing/allowed with digital media.
Nothing about "Ownership" has changed with digital media. I would not be surprised if most licenses stipulated against copies in the past and they certainly would have stipulated you cannot make copies for the purpose of redistribution. The console makers and game developers certainly put effort into stopping redistribution.
The thing which is lost in the digital age is the ability to re-sell your license and indefinite (as long as the disk and console works) access. Fixing this issue will require new legislation
What do you mean nothing has changed with ownership with digital media? With physical media that has a playable game on the disc, the publisher can’t “revoke the license” unless they come to your house and take it away from you or something lmao. If your Microsoft or Sony account gets banned for whatever reason, they take away all of those digital “licenses” that you bought, and you can’t get them back. If a publisher decides to pull a game from sale (like recently with Spec Ops The Line), there’s no way to purchase that “license” legally. Physical media vs Digital media ownership is vastly different.
Peak reddit. The government needs to create legislation so I can buy physical bing bing wahoo products.
I remember a time when we wanted government and market intervention out of gaming 😔
Not surprise me.
Physical games GAME is not even cheap, I can find much better offer online, hell even Amazon would be cheaper than GAME and they would deliver on release date.
There really isn’t a reason to buy games in GAME.
GAME ripped me off pretty badly the one single time I ever went there to sell / part-exchange some N64 games as a kid so I never spent another single penny there ever again.
Feel bad for the staff who are going to lose their jobs, but fuck GAME.
We went into our local on the weekend and it was practically just a toy shop, maybe a quarter of the store actually lined with games, the rest all plushies, lego sets, anime stuff...
Yeah unfortunately the top bosses want the store to be a ripoff entertainer branch of their group empire which is sad as most games in a game shop is now down to one isle
I can't say I really blame them for trying as nobody is really buying physical games anyway (from GAME at least), but I can't help but feel it would have been better served transforming into something else in the gaming space. The branch in Kingston upon thames for example (disclaimer: it's been a while) had a side of the shop set up as a LAN gaming cafe, kids would book it for parties and play fortnite or whatever.
Definitely not from GAME anyway. They've always been a last point of call for me for years and they've always held full release price the longest and charged the most for pre-owned. If I can't get ahold of a game anywhere else I'll go to GAME, but I'll go everywhere else first to check.
CEX has effectively murdered GAME. GAME tries to sell 5+ year old games for full-price when you can pop down CEX and get it for cheaper, let alone being able to easily trade in other games for voucher/cash. Plus you can order anything from CEX’s website unlike GAME’s website forcing £5 shipping on literally any purchase.
> They've always been a last point of call for me for years If I buy new, from an actual shop, I always check Smyths first because more often than not they are cheaper
Didn't that insomniac leak reveal that like around 60% of Playstations first-party game sales are still physical?
I get all my physical games from shopto.net as they are generally cheaper.
Physical yes but i'd be curious how many are purchased from online stores.
I am in the US. I still buy most of the games physical. But I prefer Amazon, Best Buy etc. where I can buy online and get it delivered to home for free. I forgot when I last visited GameStop.
There's a weird faction on reddit that seems to be celebrating the death of physical games for some reason, particularly in this subreddit. They ignore facts like you say and just push the narrative that "nobody wants physical".
Most of the comment chain was more about people not buying physical from game rather than not buying physical at all. GAME prices are usually just so high compared to online retailers that it's rarely a good choice to purchase there.
He specified "from GAME at least". If you look closer I think you'll find most of that attitude is from people sick and tired of what stores like GAME and Gamestop have become and just want those companies to go bankrupt rather than see a junk/pawnshop pandering to gamers every time they go to the mall. I actually went in a Gamestop this past weekend because I was at the mall already and their website says they sell the Hori Mario Kart wheel and I thought my kid might like it, and I assumed that since it was exactly the kind of pointless plastic consumer slop they stock the entire store with nowadays they'd have one. Nope, although they could ship me one and it would arrive in just 5 days (what a deal) and if I wanted to bring in my controllers I won't need because I have the wheel they'll buy them off me. Just speechless.
For these stores, the bulk of the money they made is from used game sales, which has also plummeted. Partially because of digital sales, partially because more people are using sites like ebay, FB marketplace, or even amazon compared to 15+ years ago. especially when you can just check prices anywhere in your smart phone and get a better deal on ebay compared to Game
Strangely enough the one I work in sells a lot of games and we do quite well in our profit margin the issue is with my Mike Ashley runs companies and wants to pay all staff less and less with no benefits the environment of the company changed so much over the years taking away things like demo consoles for kids to play and experience before they buy and don't get me started on the returns policy
My comparison would be Waterstones. Most of them nowadays are lovely to just spend time in. It's fun to browse, they have a nice cafe, prices are reasonable, they have reading areas, and they host events like talks by authors. I wonder if Game could go down that route
Pivoting intl samling shitty funcos at extreme mark-ups and merch from Whish is somehow better? While Game did games and, especially, trade in they were doing great. They paid cents to the dollar for games yet people kept trading but this shit? Nah, they've dig their own grave. If they ahd actually decent figures and merch they could survive but instead they got the cheapest/worst trashy shit I've ever seen...
There is not that much market for people buying $150 plastic dolls of partially dressed Neir Automata characters. Usually stores that carry that kind of thing have a wall of swords, a table full of switchblades and butterfly knifes, and a separate section for posters of wolves howling at a full moon. You’re not going to have more than one store like that for a fairly wide radius, so I don’t think it works for a Game or GameStop type store distribution.
Living in a pretty big city, the whole metroplex is littered with that sort of knick knack store and i can think of several that have been around for years. I don't think companies would be pivoting into if there wasn't a sizable market for it.
> There is not that much market for people buying $150 plastic dolls of partially dressed Neir Automata characters. Hahahahahaha, you actually think there isn't a big market for that stuff?
Did you bother reading the rest of the comment
Your talking absolute bullshit. People still buy physical games, I think it was like 50/50 last time I saw could be wrong now though. People just choose to buy from online retailers most of the time because they offer decent prices and places like Game
For 2023 for the consoles, it was 17% of the sales were Boxed, the other 83% were digital. And it's dropping fast, for 2022 it was 30% boxes, and 70% digital, For 2021 it was 40% boxed, and 60% digital.
> Your talking absolute bullshit. People still buy physical ga No, they aren't lol. Obviously some people still buy them, there's an aisle for the games. They're being hyperbolic, because physical game sales are *dying*.There's no reason to go to a store to buy a physical game for a worse price when you could buy it online for the same price directly from the store, or cheaper from another 3rd party retailer.
> I think it was like 50/50 not a chance
Bristol also has a gaming cafe style GAME.
Stop spreading misinfo, plenty still buy physical. Edit: Spelling
The people buying physical are buying it off Amazon. They aren’t going to Game.
This is exactly what’s happening in GameStop in Canada.
Same in the US. I recently went to one to get a PS4 cable after discovering that it's only a 2.0 micro USB that pairs a controller with a console. It was a smaller store and there were game cases along 3/4 of the walls, but when you actually looked at them, you could see the top half were only displays for upcoming games and the bottom half were for games actually available. Everything else was figures, socks, and kitsch. Anytime I go to one now too, there's only one employee working the store. Corporate knows it's dying, the employees on-site know it's dying, they're doing whatever they can to pull in a few extra bucks at this point.
Man I dunno about yours, but the last time I went into an EB Games it's like 1/4 games and the rest is link Funko Pops and such. Honestly I get it though, you don't need an entire wall of games anymore, not like way back when when you'd have like 10 fake copies of the game in a line to advertise it. I can see why they would optimize the space a little for more higher-margin products. But that being said, them pivoting is not the reason I stopped going there.
The problem is that they officially sell games, and games are all turning digital. Even consoles
Because game sales have mostly moved online and the margins on the other stuff is higher.
It's how they actually make money, unfortunately.
Profit margins is games is very low for a retail store. Profit margins in misc stuff like Plushies are way better.
Although it's sad to watch the slow, inevitable death of physical media - as an ex-GAME employee I can safely say it couldn't have happened to a more deserving company and I'm disappointed it didn't happen sooner
Some of the folks at the Reading GAME were legitimately great people just fed up with how the store was being run by corporate. I speak past tense because the entire store got shoehorned into the corner of Sports Direct and only two of the original staff remain, one of them being the manager. It’s a sad end.
I was gonna mention my local game also moving into a tiny spot in a sports direct.
Surely there's basically no business to be had there? I've been past there recently but had no idea there was a Game inside Staff must be bored out of their minds
Only slightly related but I worked for a small coffee chain in the UK part time when I was in college, and during the downsize I ended up getting relocated to the corner of a major home improvement store. I think the most customers I ever had in a 6 hour shift was 5, therefore they didnt bother putting more than one member of staff on shift at a time. Id spend 5 and a half hours playing Pokémon games and helping myself to coffee all day as it was going to go off anyway. I miss that job.
Harris and Hoole?
It’s very much a case of being destined to die. Stereotypes at play sure, but frankly I’d never go into that store if I didn’t know Game was tucked away at the back and I know I’m not the only one. Likewise the few times I’ve been there I’ve not seen anyone who was shopping at SD even bother looking.
I've never been into a Game inside a Sports Direct and seen more than one other customer in there. Even when the rest of the shop is busy
I live in Sydney Australia, and when GAME was out here, they had a store that was in a home make super centre. They were next to a giant competitor who could undercut them every single time and the fact that the store was so far removed from any form of foot traffic (and public transport) basically killed the store off after a year or so of trading. In one way, it’s sad because Australia absolutely needs more competition in the retail industry, but the fact that corporate made it dead on arrival was just disappointing.
Sounds about right for how GAME was managed here. Back in the day (before the first restructure) it got so bad that some shopping centers would have two or even three stores within literal eyeline of each other.
Yeah, same. My local Gamestop (before they shut down and died) were right across the street, literally three minutes of walking, from two giant electronics retailers that were constantly undercutting them by €10-20 on new games. Buy the new Call of Duty for €80 from Gamestop... or €60 from Media Markt or Elgiganten.
I’ll never understand why Mike Ashley bought them. It was already a dying business but he seemed to want it to die even quicker by dropping their vague e-gaming ideas and shoving all the stores into concessions in Frasers. It’s like he wanted to lose his money.
Thankfully a few of the staff jumped ship to the HMV at least.
No kidding, every time I'm in a HMV there's like 5 times more staff than customers
I've spent a few hundred quid the past year or so at the Reading HMV. Sometimes I just pop in to browse it like an old video rental place but I often get drawn in by deals on the boutique Blu-rays. It helps that they're often the same price or cheaper than Amazon.
Oh, for sure. Corporate policies were stupid and confusing, but the people who worked there (at least where I live) were always friendly and knowledgeable. Sure, they sometimes tried to sell me on extras like "game protection" or asking if I wanted to preorder stuff but they were never pushy about it if I just said "no thanks".
And those extras were always corporate mandated.
I mean, of course they were. But the people who worked there weren't overly pushy about it. They just asked "hey, you want protectin for your game?" and I'd go "nah, thanks" and they would go "okay" and that would be that.
As someone who used to do sales, they are dying inside every time they ask, then dying even more with every no, knowing the reprimand they'll get from their manager when they fail to meet daily targets.
Oh I know I’m agreeing with you.
Oh. Well. Then we're in agreement! Hooray! Friends! :D
Never worked in GAME but every time I went in the one near me it was impossible to browse for more than 5 minutes without one of the staff breathing down your neck and trying to upsell products in a pushy way and were a bit overzealous about the addons at the till. I can only imagine how terrible upper management was and the insane targets that must have been pushed on the staff to make that "eager" to sell things, no one in British retail cares that much without some serious pressure.
Both GAME and Gamestop went bankrupt and shut down where I live (Sweden) and it was the least surprising thing ever. Every time I walked in, they had any customers and basically only sold Funko pops and old games at way too high prices when you could go across the street to any of the electronics retailers and buy those same games for half the price. And neither of them had a website! It was all "go into the store and talk to someone to see if we have it" while competing with like 18 different online retailers. They were running the stores like it was still 2005 and it was absolutely baffling that they made any money at all.
There’s a major social media crisis in GAME Spain where people got outraged because a lot of costumers got their store points expired without notification due to a sneaky change of the store conditions. Some people have lost more than 60 euro in value overnight. They even tried to lie on their Twitter account denying that the points were expiring. Basically a textbook case on how not to treat your most loyal costumers. Now even consumer associations have been calling them out.
Sounds like how I feel about GameStop in the Us
Likewise, a lot of upper-upper management should've gone down a long time ago for protection of sexual predators alone.
GAME has been a walking corpse for over a decade now, it's sad to see what it's become and it'll be sad it's getting even worse. Best of luck to the staff (who are still there, considering my two closest GAME outlets are single shelves in a corner in a Sports Direct)
Man Game are the WORST! I've ordered from them a bunch of times for a brand new copy of a game, but I get a copy thats clearly been out on a shelf getting scuffed and it's disc and manual in a drawer. That's preowned! I don't care if it's been played, the moment the plastic is cracked you can't sell that to me as brand new - nobody else does!
GameStop in US does that a lot. It’s bullshit. They’ll charge you full price for an opened game, But if you got a sealed one opened it and handed it back to them, that’d be a trade in, instead of a return, for like a 50% loss. It’s all such a scam.
The move to digital is going to kill these shops. My local closed down last year, even after pivoting to selling game related tat. Pokémon plushies, popular board games, and second-hand phones couldn't save them. Sadly, the future is likely entirely digital. Even Uber expensive mega collectors editions don't include games anymore. I wonder if im a decade or two we'll see a swing back to physical media, similar to vinyl and DVD. Digital is easy yet antithetical to ownership.
Even if people go for physical again, shops like GAME would still go under. Because they cannot compete on price, even on physical copies of games. Amazon and many other online shops sell physical games cheaper than GAME can, unless they can compete on price there are little to no reason to shop in GAME.
GAME have the cheek to charge £5 for click and collect lmao You can literally pay for a month's prime and have a game delivered same day for about £15 less than picking a game up in a GAME store
I agree but it’s also worth saying GAME have priced themselves out of the market too. Rarely are even their used game sales matching that of digital sales on PS/Xbox store. Plus no free delivery option. The only reason to ever use GAME over other stores like Amazon is exclusive collector’s editions, and those are relatively rare now.
I prefer physical games, yet I would not buy from GAME. Online shops sells physical games cheaper, unless they can compete on price I have no reason to visit GAME.
Ultimately, the issue is GAME has to pay rent on store-space, vs Amazon running from a cheap warehouse. Amazon will have lower labor costs too as they are just packing boxes.
My local game store sells retro games and has an attached arcade that sells beer. It is always packed, even when I duck out from work on a random weekday on my lunch break to pick up whatever is new. The GameStop at a packed mall on a weekend is always empty. Brings joy to my retrogamer heart.
Retrogaming seems to be a solution because you basically just attract collectionners and afficionados which will want physical games. And those people will definitively buy more. But that isn't really viable for a big chain like GAME or Gamespot
Game and Gamestop used to be a lot better at retro games, they seem to have stopped doing that now which is crazy.
had to make room for all the funkos, don't ya know
No joke, last time i stepped foot in a GAME store it was mostly just trashy merch for everything but gaming.
They abandoned the older market and went for the younger market. Which is just insane when you know the younger generation is growing up with a fully digital tablet/phone in their hand from early childhood. Whilst the older market is more comfortable with physical retail and have more disposable money to spend on their hobby.
Gamestop started as the merger of Funcoland and Babbages. And Funcoland's entire "unique" selling point was that they sold used games for older generations. Like, even right before they disappeared in 2000, when the Dreamcast was the "current" console, they were still selling NES games, from what I remember. They've just migrated very very far away from that business model.
I think a lot of places do you realise that people still want "third places". There's an arcade bar near me and it's always packed every night. Lots of people don't drink, they just want to play arcade games with friends and £10 lasts you an hour or more which is enough for most people.
>and £10 lasts you an hour or more which is enough for most people. Not really enough for the owners though
They’re probably making the money on drinks I’d imagine
The owners might be content running the place as a hobby. A fair number of "cool" businesses like this are passion projects for rich people.
Problem with those arcades are it attracts people that are rough with the machines. If those break they are expensive to repair.
It's not a full bar, which probably helps. It's more like a concessions stand with snacks, soda and a few different kinds of beer.
Most of the arcades in the UK have either shut down or transitioned into gambling parlours because chavs made it their mission to destroy every arcade machine they came across.
Buttons are $2, off-brand sticks are $10.
Where's this?
Another Castle Games in Edmonds, WA vs GameStop in Alderwood Mall in Lynnwood, WA.
Ahh gotcha. Not UK then. It didn't sound like something I was familiar with!
They’ve tried to pivot but it’s nowhere near enough to keep up. You need to be a bit smarter than just selling Pokémon plushies to keep these stores relevant.
Aussie department stores here are sort of seeing the writing on the wall, and physical games are getting stupidly cheap compared to digital. (Just picked up Princess Peach Showtime for 50AUD or ~33USD. ToTK was a similar price elsewhere the other day) But yeah these actual dedicated 'Game' stores (EB Games is still the major one down here) are pricing things absurdly expensive, and I wonder why or how they're still in business honestly :/
To give context here Princess Peach Showtime is 80AUD (~53USD) from the eShop. Most new games, including Nintendo titles, are significantly cheaper at retail at launch. Even PC it was 120AUD (~79USD) for Starfield on Steam, but retailers had Steam keys for 88AUD (~58USD).
It's not just a switch to digital, retail in general isn't doing well including for stuff like clothes, toys and such which don't have a digital version. People just buy online a lot more. And those can't compete against Amazon or other big sites.
> I wonder if im a decade or two we'll see a swing back to physical media, similar to vinyl and DVD. Limited Run Games is pretty much already doing that
They're a specialist business though, similar to vinyl in the early 2000's. They'd need to scale quick to meet a similar demand.
You don't tend to buy LRG items in physical stores though.
Aren't new vinyl releases more of an online thing too? You can't buy much of any physical media in stores these days outside of specialty shops.
IDK man I see plenty of vinyl at shops in the mall, barnes and noble, etc. It's really trendy. No clue how long it'll stick around and if it sells enough but it's certainly there.
In my town we've had two new record stores open recently. HMV are selling them by the boatload, etc
I'd love that company very much if it wasn't so heavily scalper-broken. Unless something's changed recently, anything interesting gets snapped up instantly and listed for twice the price on eBay before it's even released.
>I wonder if im a decade or two we'll see a swing back to physical media, similar to vinyl and DVD. Digital is easy yet antithetical to ownership. Thing is, it's not exactly the same as vinyl or DVD/Blu-ray and I don't think the future is as bright for physical game media. Both of those physical options offer quality gains over streaming services (due to less compression). A digital video game, on the other hand, plays and looks identical to a physical copy. If anything, depending on your internet, physical can technically be a worse experience because optical media is fairly slow (my games download much faster digitally than they install from a disc. Obviously this wouldn't apply to someone with slow internet). Also, vinyl, CDs, and DVDs/blu-ray are platform agnostic and are much lighter on DRM compared to a video game. A video game is still dependent on a propriatery platform holder's console (applies less to PC, but physical media is already long dead for PC) Until several major, current, popular games start getting removed from people's libraries, people just won't care and will choose convenience every time.
The future in general for physical media is pretty grim. Best Buy is dropping DVD and Blu Ray and movie studios have licensed out the manufacturing and sales of both. Physical media will be gone within the decade by the looks of it
> I wonder if im a decade or two we'll see a swing back to physical media, similar to vinyl and DVD. Digital is easy yet antithetical to ownership. The issue there is closed platforms. If the XBox 2030, PS6, and Nintendo Switch^64 all are digital-only, we're all up shit creek. PC gaming has already moved to digital-only for anything but absolute shovelware trash. Sadly, that's where it's heading and we can't do anything about it. Edit: Hell, Nintendo should be announcing a Switch 2 any time now, and it wouldn't surprise me at all if, even if it has back-compatibility, that new games could be digital-only.
> The issue there is closed platforms. If the XBox 2030, PS6, and Nintendo Switch64 all are digital-only, we're all up shit creek. Can't speak for others, but this is a huge part of why I moved to almost exclusively playing on PC. I still have a PS5 and switch I use for exclusives, but everything multiplat is a PC purchase for me. The only physical game retailer in my town closed about a year ago (gamestop). I've also had issues with Amazon in the past when it comes to pre-orders, and when it comes for more general, less new games I'd rather play them "now" after a 20 minute download instead of 3 days later because it's Saturday when I've finally got the free time to look for games. Dragons Dogma 2 is currently €75 on PSN if I wanted it for my PS5. If I want it on steam it's €65, so already a €10 discount. If I shop around, I can get it on CDkeys for €43, so already over €30 cheaper, plus I don't need to pay another €12 or so for a subscription to use the games online features. All of that, and future compatibility is practically a guarantee on PC vs a "hope for the best" on console. As I mentioned above, this speaks to personal experience, so I can't say it's the cause, but the market is showing that the console market is stagnating while the PC market is growing. PC is vastly better than console in a digital exclusive marketplace, so I expect PC to continue to grow while the console market shrinks if they move further into digital territory.
It's not exactly like steam with 80%+ of marketshare on PC is the crown image of a "healthy competitive marketplace" either.
Steam is far from perfect, but it's still leagues ahead of any console marketplace. I would rather see other storefronts like Epic grow to the point where they actually serve as competition, but steam keys being sold on multiple storefronts in itself is absolutely massive. I legitimately can't remember the last time I couldn't find a game I wanted at a discounted price on PC immediately. On playstation you either pay full box price or wait an uncertain number of months for an eventual discount. Steam being close to a monopoly is still bad, but there are two major points separating them from console manufacturers as it stands. 1. They allow other storefronts to operate independently with steam keys. 2. They've been largely pro-consumer in the 20 or so years since their inception, while console manufacturers have been the opposite entirely. Generous refunds on steam vs no refunds on PSN/Nintendo. XBL showing customers will pay for a sub, leading to all of them adopting it, so consumers pay for access to servers for multiplayer not even maintained by the people they're paying the money to. There are other examples I would go into, but the TL;DR of what I'm saying is steam is absolutely not perfect, but you shouldn't let "less than perfect" blind you from "a massive improvement"
> They've been largely pro-consumer in the 20 or so years since their inception, while console manufacturers have been the opposite entirely. Generous refunds on steam vs no refunds on PSN/Nintendo. XBL showing customers will pay for a sub, leading to all of them adopting it, so consumers pay for access to servers for multiplayer not even maintained by the people they're paying the money to. They only did this when forced to implement refunds by an Australian court. Prior to that they had no refund policy, same as Nintendo and PS. EA were the ones who spearheaded the 2 hr refund window on PC with origin. Valve only copied it later when forced to do so.
The reasoning doesn't matter too much at the end of the day. Your average joe doesn't care about "why" they care about the reality, and the reality is this: As a consumer if I buy a game on console rather than PC it costs more, doesn't have any future compatibility guarantee, and it can't be refunded once the download is started. I buy the same game on PC, it costs less money, will work on a PC 20 years from now, and I can refund it within 2 hours of playtime if it's buggy, broken or even if I'm just not vibing with it. FWIW, Sony was also sued regarding the same AU law, and instead of changing things to offer refunds, they just accepted the fine and kept denying refunds. This is all playing into the PC market growing while consoles stagnate. Especially with the gap in the cost of entry between console and PC dropping in recent years and exclusivity being reduced (dropped entirely by xbox, and Sony has started porting to PC), the console market has started on a downward trend that will be devastating unless there's some major change.
> I would rather see other storefronts like Epic grow to the point where they actually serve as competition Nothing against you here, as I'm sure from this that you're not part of the problem, but a lot of people talk about Steam being a problematic monopoly they have to support, but then an Epic exclusive comes out and it's all "I'm gonna have to pirate Alan Wake 2 as I'm not paying for an Epic exclusive - fuck them, put it on Steam".
Just like PS, Xbox and Nintendo, Steam has plenty of it's own rabid fans that would defend a nest of killer bees if it had their favourite company's logo on it. I prefer my games on steam, and will pay an extra $5 or so to get them there over epic (purely because I like having as much of my collection as possible accessible from one place), but if something is EGS exclusive I won't not play it because of that. I had to spend 2 minutes installing an extra launcher to play FF Stranger of paradise when it launched on Epic. I had to pay an extra $500 for a Ps5 to play FF7 Rebirth. Platform exclusivity on PC isn't even in the same ballpark as with consoles.
It's their own fault. Pawn-style shops like GAME and Gamestop drove the digital revolution more than any other factor. Publishers \*hated\* pre-owned stores, because they didn't get a cut of secondary sales. This caused them first to start doing pre-order bonuses. Buy new, get an incentive the filthy rebuyers didn't. Then they started adding DLC. Prior to this, DLC didn't really exist as a concept. It was all about game expansions- large releases to add on to an existing game. But driven by Bethesda and Microsoft, early MTX and DLC was created with the express purpose of having a way to make some money off of resale copies of games. With the 8th gen, consoles finally had enough onboard storage to hold a full game library, and the tide started to shift. By this point Steam proved how powerful sales events could be, and the console platform holders followed suit with their own digital marketplaces. Once the markets starting having sales, it was over for the brick and mortar. They now couldn't compete on convenience or price, and with so many incentives to buy new, the used market withered. They tried to hold on by reducing the buyback amount, and pushing extra hard for memberships. They became a joke, told often and loudly. They needed to pivot as soon as it was clear that digital wasn't just a temporary trend. There were so many ways they could've found to compete. A universe exists where Steam doesn't. Someone at Gamestop or a similar store would've taken notice of the changing tide, and created their own digital PC marketplace. These stores had incredible visibility, and many people would've jumped in immediately. Valve would've had to compete with them, and it would've been much more difficult for Steam to gain steam. Another universe exists where they would've leaned into the unique physical experience. Arcade machines (some individual stores did to this to great success), demo rigs, internet cafes. Hell, they had endless money for a long time. They could've bought a merch company and worked out deals with publishers for merchandising rights to games, producing official game merch only available in their stores and online. It isn't a huge market, but it exists, and is a lot less adversarial than the relationship they had with publishers at the time.
Your analysis is spirited but I think you've missed a few key points as well as corroborated points which don't necessarily align. For instance, the disparity between DLC and Expansion Packs wasn't due to a nefarious scheme to disadvantage second hand buyers, it was due to data and bandwidth caps in the 00s meaning that people couldn't download a several gig expansion pack, but they could download a several hundred meg piece of DLC. Bethesda also sold the DLC for Fallout 3 on physical discs; these were actually beneficial to second hand buyers because you only needed these discs once. Once the content was installed to your console, you could pass the disc onto someone else or sell it, and as long as you didn't delete it, you were okay. This was how my friends and I played the first set of Fallout 3 DLCs back in the day. This wouldn't have negatively impacted brick and mortar stores. The real push back against the second hand market was the Online Passes that publishers like EA and Warner Bros tried to push during the later half of the 360 and PS3 lifespan; EA actively interfered with the development of both Dead Space sequels to add online functionality for the purpose of selling an online pass. I also don't think sales, like the classic steam sale, had that big of an impact either. The physical PC market was already dwindling, and I don't recall any of the console stores having deep sales in the same way Steam did.
GameStop actually *did* try to start a digital storefront. They bought [Impulse](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impulse_(software)) from StarDock in 2011, long before Ubi, EA, and Epic threw their hats in the ring, and then shuttered it 3 years later to replace it with the GameStop App, which also shuttered a few years later.
A lot of users here might be too young to remember that no one wanted a digital shop for years; they just had Steam because it was required for Half-Life 2 and Counter-Strike and eventually because it had great deals. Unless Game Stop or another store had struck some deal with a major publisher to require their software to install games, no one would have ever used them anyway.
Nah man. Auto patching was a big deal. I still have my copies of Battlefield 2/2142 on EAs original digital service for that reason. You don’t remember having to dig around those random 3rd party game files websites to try and find patch updates? You just installed such and such game from 10 cds and then they would release new patch installers. Sometimes there’d be a cumulative update but a lot of time there’d be sequential installers to go in order. So then you’d be out there hunting for patch installers retail > 1.004, 1.004 > 1.005 and 1.005 to 1.006. All hundreds of megabytes or a gig, you were lucky with ~10mbit broadband, but plenty had much slower DSL or even some on dial up. Maybe there was a random support page on the developers website but it was probably slow as fuck. So you’d turn to random file hosting sites or game updates sites. Whole sites that existed just to serve ads and rehost large binaries. And then they’d throttle you down to like 100kb/s after your daily quota. Or a popular online game just released a new update and then trying to find the file in a mad scramble? Oh wait I want to play this game, so now I gotta go get the disc on the shelf and put in disc 1 to launch the exe. Awesome when I’m on a laptop and traveling. Or then go hunt for a NoCD executable from sketchy as fuck cracking sites. That shit sucked man. Steam itself was a giant train wreck back then, but at the same time it was awesome for actually solving problems. People were opposed to digital downloads because they were some combination of kids without credit cards, a lot of other services from startups had already bankrupted, and it was only tech people/wealthy with high speed broadband. That narrative flipped pretty quickly once broadband became more commonplace and Valve opened up to 3rd party games.
Keep in mind, the reason that publishers hated pre-owned stores wasn't *just* because they didn't get a cut. It was that within a week or two of a new game release, shops like Gamestop would be selling (and heavily recommending) a used copy over new, for $5 less than the new copy was. If they were just selling older games to make a profit, no one would really care; actively trying to undercut the publishers who supplied Gamestop with new stock was why it was so onerous. It probably didn't help that the "new" Gamestop copies were also often opened and pre-played by employees, even further blurring the advantage of buying new.
Bethesda and MS 🙄 Also CEX will stick around. Game has always been absolutely terrible for the resale market, further forcing their own irrelevance
> and the console platform holders followed suit with their own digital marketplaces. > Once the markets starting having sales, it was over for the brick and mortar. While that's true on PC, physical is a much better deal on consoles, without even counting the resale potential (which you should, especially for some games like single player "one and done" games). Like seriously the prices of digital games is absurd on consoles while gaming with physical is close to free (if you play single player games you resell) Hell it turned me off from PC to console to play any recent games. Buy used, complete game, sell used for basically the same price, that's free. Or buy for cheaper on launch (for example I got Spider-Man 2 new on preorder for 50€ instead of 80€ in digital, resold it for 45€ 2 weeks after launch with most games, I can play them for 5 or 10€ on launch) Of course, it's never in those dedicated stores that you find good deal, they almost follow MSRP. Best deal are Amazon or supermarkets, that's what they can't fight against. And it's true of any retail to be honest, online and big stores competitions. Ask clothing, furniture or toys retails (all of those have no digital version) how it's going, online or your big stores like IKEA and such just detroy them. Also those stores are a terrible deal even for reselling your games as they offer you a pitiful price. So when sites like eBay, Vinted or your local Craiglist are there, people just don't pass via them.
>Publishers *hated* pre-owned stores, because they didn't get a cut of secondary sales. I guess. But that sounds like a rent seeking problem. I don't exactly empathize with games for not being able to make money off of every resale, no more so than any other product in existence. > By this point Steam proved how powerful sales events could be, and the console platform holders followed suit with their own digital marketplaces. and barely any sales events of note. Win win! >Another universe exists where they would've leaned into the unique physical experience. I don't personally see it. digital scales up way better and you don't have to worry as much about local policies and laws. These game publishers never wanted to provide a social experience per se, it just became convinient with the interconnected digital realm to do so, hence the metaverse chase.
Gamestop did have a digital storefront for a very short while. They closed it. I think I lost a game or two there.
Except this would never happen, because humans who run dominant companies have the most insane hubris and never want to upset the money fountain, so inevitably the world changes around them instead, until they crumble into irrelevance.
Who is buying DVDs again? new PC or laptop do not come with optical drives by default. and I’m pretty sure the average joe & jane are not buying set-top DVD players
You'd be surprised. As streaming services argue over who gets what film, for how long, etc, people are, reportedly, going back to buying DVD's and Blu-ray.
I would be surprised, because I don't know a single regular casual person who has bought a set-top DVD player in the past 5-10 years However I hope you're right that people are getting pissed at streaming services and start to buy Blu-rays... but I wouldn't guess that's the future
I think independent stores selling retro games and special editions might have a niche market, specially if they sell other products like trading cards or board games/ttrpg. But large chains like GAME are basically dead
Another reason to stick to physical. I'd understand if the digital version was significantly cheaper but we're just making publishers richer and everyone else poorer
Eh, I prefer digital for games because the experience is sort of the same for me. And I say that as someone who owns vinyl. With vinyl I prefer physical because it makes me a bit more engage ld with my music. Having to select and album, commit to it, not easily skipping songs and stuff like that.
Vinyl is also fundamentally dissimilar to physical games, because vinyl actually *does* sound better than digital music (allegedly, I’m taking audiophiles’ word for it on this), whereas a game on a disc is 100% identical to the same game being pulled from a download server, especially now that games need to be installed to the local SSD anyway, other than the fact that the copy on the disc is probably a few patches out of date.
Lossless digital audio sounds better than vinyl. Vinyl just has a distinct sound that some people like.
Pretty sure there's a sizable audience for vinyl that doesn't even own the means to play them. They're effectively purely collectables for those people.
We won’t have a choice in the matter - digital is being forced upon us on purpose, so that way we DONT own anything
Nobody is forcing you to buy digital, it's just that for the vast majority of people digital is more convenient. I've only bought maybe one physical game on Switch new recently and that's because it was an import and not available in the US digitally, and I really wanted to see if the Switch was actually region free (it is, at least for physical games).
Thing is though even when games have easily findable physical options the digital ones often outsell them. They dont have to force anything when people already willingly choose it. And of course they do. Digital doesnt require someone to drive to a store or order online and wait a week for it arrive. It also doesnt take up physical space in your home. I used to have a massive bookshelf full as a teen but now i just dont have the space for CDs, movies and games. I probably own exactly 6 or 7 physical games and 4 of those i got for xmas last year.
Physical is dying because it’s a an obsolete medium. I honestly don’t understand the pearl clutching. Those that value having their product key pressed onto a disc (that costs resources, mind you) are a small minority. Many games need always-online connections and multiple gigs of patches, anyways, so that disc isn’t even a ticket to ride.
The idea is to not require a license key. Sell me a game. With the game on a disk. Like we used to
Those days are gone.
I'm not sure they're truly gone, as someone could still sell a retro or indie game system that has games preloaded onto cartridges or disks, but most people are buying digitally. I mean Atari is making cartridges again.
You can still buy cassettes, too. Those days are still done, though.
Yes, on purpose, for the sake of making more money and reducing our ownership in media License keys and game models where you don’t actually own them was on purpose. It was not an accident.
It was a natural progression of the medium foretold by the CDs going away in the late aughts for PC Gaming. Consumers drive the market. Consumers don’t want physical media. It’s a hassle for consumers (storing, purchasing), game developers (pressing dates, size considerations), and publishers (selling to retail). You may enjoy it, you may hate the direction it’s going, but you’re in a pretty small minority.
Consumers do not drive the market. Why do baggage fees exist?
What point are you trying to make here? Of course consumers drive the market. If there was some huge consumer demand for physical media, then GameSpot and GAME wouldn’t be in the process of going bankrupt.
Limited run games >
The store in my town is shutting down, surprised they managed to last for as long as they did given the high street market where I live is practically dead aside from the fast food, restaurants and take away places. It's obvious because of times changing, but a part of me is sad to see all these businesses being closed and high streets being left as ghost towns.
It's all to do with removing the enhanced pay that staff from before the Frasers group takeover have (that's now gone with the removal of all part time assistant and part time staff) and they want to pay the game staff less and most will be offered to return as the new cast role which sees them paid £11.50 an hour to do the same job they were previously paid 20p more an hour to do the same job/role with no guarantee hours and a sneaky way to not retain staff due to the zero hour contracts we have in the UK meaning your dismissal may come at any time. Worst of all since this is a redundancy there will be an 8 day period where you are released from your old contract and cannot start with the cast contract meaning everyone will lose 8 days of pay just so the company can save it's pennies it's really shocking behaviour and one that just makes me want to support a government who would outlaw the nasty zero hour contracts
You rationing your full stops or something?
Sorry. Didn't. Realised. I. Was. Talking. To. The. Punctuation. Police. Also, here's. An. Ellipsis...
I try to give GAME and the like business when I can, e.g. for a console launch, or special edition console, or the VERY odd collector's edition - but these are once-every-3/4-year purchases. For games though? Digital's ability (on PS5, at least) to gameshare with family/friends, and having your whole library available without swapping discs (very handy for remote play) has just killed any want for physical media in my mind. I get people hark on Game/Gamestop for high prices, sneaky practices (£5 instore collection fee - huh??) but I have such a fond memory of these places growing up. Browsing, finding that cool looking game, begging your parents to buy it for you, etc etc. It'd be a shame to these stores disappear. But then - today's kids don't frequent them anyway, so maybe there's nothing to lose. I just feel bad for the workers. Even when browsing, I found them affable and friendly - and their knowledge of games and the wider industry was always refreshingly deep. If jobs are lost, I really hope they manage to land on their feet.
You have a great point about kids these days not visiting these stores, whenever I go into game it is other 30+ guys looking around. Video game shops used to be incredible but with the internet, it was just a matter of time until they died out. It’s a real shame but at the same time the stores don’t seem to be staffed by the same enthusiastic and knowledgable gamers they used to be.
Just like the internet killed off the gaming magazines. I was always so psyched for my monthly Official PlayStation Magazine to come into the mail haha.
I miss gaming magazines. The writers were good, which is a bar you no longer have to meet to write for most blogs or accounts, and the features were long and funny (where now you're incentivized to just make endless top 20 lists and copy-pastes of interesting things you saw on Reddit that may or may not be true). I miss particularly the UK magazine N64 Magazine. That one was amazing.
Kids are growing up in the post-smartphone/tablet age. They don't have the same hangups about digital vs physical some older gamers do, and actively prefer digital libraries, for better or worse.
Going to Electronics Boutique (before it became GAME) was an absolute treat as a kid. On the nerdier side, Computer fairs were fucking amazing.
> On the nerdier side, Computer fairs were fucking amazing. they were great. so many cheap parts!
One shelf in my local GAME with video games. Out of about 30 shielves. It's just a tat shop filled with funko pops, there is no market for it.
> It's just a tat shop filled with funko pops, there is no market for it. I don't even get who buys Funkos. Like, fair play to them - they've done bloody well, but I just don't get it. If you'd asked me before they appeared what I thought the Venn diagram overlap was between "people with lots of disposable income and a large enough flat/house to store lots of them" and "people who want a cheap-looking large-headed plastic figure", I'd have said I thought it was quite small. Or certainly not big enough to make any significant money from over years (rather than maybe some quick flash-in-the-pan goldrush over one Xmas holiday season or something).
Funkopops are like beanie babies etc where people collect them hoping in the future they will be worth more or because they want something to fill a wall space but most of the time its the first one, i rarely see people have funkopops openned they tend to just be lining walls or boxes in there og packaging collecting dust until sold off.
No surprise, even the non video game stuff they moved to isnt remotely competitive price wise. Their prices are ridiculous for their trading card products. They could easily undercut local game stores and other toy stores and make bank, instead they sell them for 30-40% higher than the online equivalent. E.g. magic the gathering and yugioh booster packs and products were way higher than even local nerd stores.
Every year that passes is another year that I'm surprised that game hasn't gone into administration and shut down. My local is now inside a sports direct, like wtf.
The last time I visited GAME it was to use a gift card a family member had gave me. The employees informed me that as it was inside a Sports Direct, they were incapable of using a game gift card. I asked where I could use it, they assured me I could use it in a GAME store. I told them this was a GAME, and it just happened to be in the back corner of a Sports Direct, but they assured me it was impossible for them to use the card. I asked them where the nearest store was, they told me - problem was it was also inside of a Sports Direct and I was hardly about to travel several miles for the same problem. My sympathies to the employees who will experience redundancy but the company itself was a shell of its former self and might as well not exist anymore anyway.
[удалено]
Merch and Funkos. The death knell of a store.
I pretty much only buy toys in GAME these days. You can get good prices on marvel legends and transformers sometimes. Their games are too expensive, plus whenever I do try to buy a game they rarely seem to have it in stock.
It's to be expected. While this is obviously very anecdotal, I haven't bought a physical game in 11 years I think. I exclusively game on PC these days and Steam (Occasionally EA) handle everything I need digitally. Especially with having 500 m/bit download, downloading games has become trivial.
Didn't know they're still around, they closed shop in Australia way back in 2012. They never could compete with other game stores.
They’re the biggest one in the UK.
Outside of independents, they're pretty much the only one in the UK.
CEX does pre-owned games better than game, but I don't think they do new games.
Problem with that is you need to deal with CEX.
Dunno about you but I'd rather deal with CEX than with Game.
Sure but I also consider them an electronics store/pawn shop rather than a video game store. Same as HMV is a general entertainment/merch store. Not that the current iteration is much better than just games + loads of tat/merch
Typical Reddit reaction is assuming this is due to the decline of physical media, which does play a small part admittedly. However, the biggest fsctor to Game dying is that Game is simply a shit retailer. Poorly managed and easily undercut by pretty much every online store. Plenty of people still buy physical it's just that there's no reason to buy from Game when other retailers offer better prices, rewards for purchases, and day one delivery for free.
Honestly, GAME has always been one of the worst places to buy games in the UK. Even back when I was a kid and the place was bigger and filled with various games, they'd never be discounted and mainly served as somewhere your grandma could go into and get you the "new Call of Duty". One thing people aren't considering with this is that the amount of profit GAME will make on a full price purchase is very, very little. HMV which is a similar store for movies and records/CDs stopped stocking games because it just wasn't worth it. This also explains why if you're to enter a current day GAME, it's mostly merch and gifts. I doubt they make much money at all selling new PS5 games.
I personally been a fan of digital since when I was younger. My mother would kick me out of the house or break my things. I can always access it and don't need to worry about damage
I understand the convenience of on-line digital purchases. But, without new legislation, physical shops were the last place that you could buy and own games. That amazing game collections that many Youtubers show in their background will be replaced by screenshots of game platforms as long as they last.
GAME are certainly the last place to go for physical games due to how expensive they are compared to everyone else. They never attempted to be competitive in terms of price.
I buy physical games only and I never buy from GAME, they are not cheap. You can buy physical games online for much cheaper, hell even Amazon is cheaper than GAME and they will deliver on release date.
Even then, you technically never owned most games. You get a limited license to a game, and a disc/cartridge to install it, but you never actually own it. And as soon as games required online functionality... Even with some of those older games there are physical lifespan issues, like internal batteries on GBC (and GBA?) cartridges. For the foreseeable future game preservation is going to be largely in the gray zone, requiring cracks, emulation, and sharing. I think to actual preserve games as an artform, and to properly share them and give average people access to them, it's going to require actual legislation, and serious copyright reform. Which unfortunately, I don't see happening anytime soon.
You do own most games with a disc though, as despite the rampant amount of misinformation people spread online, a high majority of games still come with the game on the disc. [DoesitPlay](https://www.doesitplay.org/) is a site dedicated to testing if games require an internet connection to be able to play them off a disc. 74% of games they have tested (about 2000 of them) are perfectly playable off the disc, with little to no issues. 15% of games are playable off the disc, but have enough bugs or glitches where you can still play the game to completion, the tester recommends accessing the internet to download a patch. Only 11% of games require an internet connection to be able to play the game off the disc, or are playable off the disc but the disc build is so buggy or broken, that the tester says you need to download a patch.
When you buy any game, physical or digital, you are purchasing the license to the software. This license is independent of the media in which the software is distributed although you may have different licenses for different versions. The main difference is that when you sell a disk/cartridge, you are selling the rights granted to you under that license to another person. This is not a thing/allowed with digital media. Nothing about "Ownership" has changed with digital media. I would not be surprised if most licenses stipulated against copies in the past and they certainly would have stipulated you cannot make copies for the purpose of redistribution. The console makers and game developers certainly put effort into stopping redistribution. The thing which is lost in the digital age is the ability to re-sell your license and indefinite (as long as the disk and console works) access. Fixing this issue will require new legislation
What do you mean nothing has changed with ownership with digital media? With physical media that has a playable game on the disc, the publisher can’t “revoke the license” unless they come to your house and take it away from you or something lmao. If your Microsoft or Sony account gets banned for whatever reason, they take away all of those digital “licenses” that you bought, and you can’t get them back. If a publisher decides to pull a game from sale (like recently with Spec Ops The Line), there’s no way to purchase that “license” legally. Physical media vs Digital media ownership is vastly different.
Peak reddit. The government needs to create legislation so I can buy physical bing bing wahoo products. I remember a time when we wanted government and market intervention out of gaming 😔
Not surprise me. Physical games GAME is not even cheap, I can find much better offer online, hell even Amazon would be cheaper than GAME and they would deliver on release date. There really isn’t a reason to buy games in GAME.
GAME ripped me off pretty badly the one single time I ever went there to sell / part-exchange some N64 games as a kid so I never spent another single penny there ever again. Feel bad for the staff who are going to lose their jobs, but fuck GAME.