Have you gone to GameStop over the past few months and tried to buy a new game? Have they told you that it’s not in stock? They may simply be lying to you, fuelled by a new program that discourages GameStop salespeople from selling unopened copies of video games.
Illustration by Sam Woolley
The program, called “Circle of Life”, gives each GameStop store different percentage quotas for 1) pre-orders, 2) reward card subscriptions, 3) used game sales and 4) game trade-ins. Each of these quotas is based on the store’s total transactions. Pre-orders and reward card subscriptions are based on the number of transactions, while used game sales and trade-ins are based on the total dollar value of transactions. If a store’s quota for used game sales is 30 per cent, and the store sells $1000 worth of merchandise, GameStop expects at least $300 of that merchandise to be pre-owned.
So if someone walks into GameStop and picks up, say, a brand new copy of Yakuza 0 without 1) pre-ordering another game, 2) subscribing for a new rewards card, 3) buying a used game or 4) trading in some games to help pay for it, then the transaction will knock down all four percentages.
The more new games an employee sells, the more used games they will have to sell to make up for it. In other words, according to salespeople speaking to Kotaku and elsewhere on the internet, GameStop is incentivising employees to stop people from buying new games and hardware. GameStop staff say the company has threatened to fire people who don’t hit these quotas, which is leading to all sorts of scuzzy tactics.
“We are telling people we don’t have new systems in stock so we won’t take a $300 or $400 dollar hit on our pre-owned numbers,” one GameStop employee told me in an email, requesting anonymity because he was not authorised to speak to press. “This is company wide and in discussions with my peers it is a common practice. We also tell customers we don’t have copies of new games in stock when they are on sale — for example, Watch Dogs 2 is currently $29.99 new and $54.99 pre-owned. We just tell them we don’t have the new one in stock and shuffle them out the door.”
The Circle of Life program, which began late last year but ramped up in early 2017 according to staff, attaches a specific “COL” score to each employee and each store. Each of the four categories represents 25 per cent of that total COL score. So if a store hits their quotas for pre-orders and rewards cards, but not for trade-ins and used games, their COL will be 50 per cent. If an employee hits all four of his quotas, he’ll get a COL of 100 per cent.
GameStop staff have told me that corporate managers are monitoring both stores and individual employees, asking everyone to get a COL score of at least 75 per cent by hitting at least three of their four quotas. If a store is hitting their COL targets but one salesperson is not, that salesperson may face punishment or even lose their job, according to company employees.
When contacted by Kotaku, GameStop’s corporate office sent over the following statement: “All of GameStop’s internal programs are designed to provide our customers the best value in all their video game purchases, including new and pre-owned merchandise. With any program, opportunities arise for improvement and we will continue to refine it to equip our knowledgeable store associates to provide a great store experience.”
Customers have long complained about GameStop’s tendency to push pre-owned games and pre-orders, but this new Circle of Life program has taken forcefulness to a new level. Employees across the web are complaining about this new practice, which they say punishes them for doing their jobs. On the GameStop Reddit, employees have gathered to share gripes and tips for hitting their COL numbers so they don’t get fired.
But these numbers are often out of the staff’s control. During game launch events, for example, GameStop employees will usually sell nothing but new games, damaging their percentages and therefore lowering their COL scores.
“The other day working the RE7/Kingdom Hearts launch we were telling walk-in (non-reserve) customers that we didn’t have the games in stock or that they were only for pre-orders in order to not sell new copies of games,” said a GameStop employee. “It’s that bad.”
A second employee also said they found themselves in trouble after selling a bunch of new games last Tuesday, during the launch of Resident Evil 7, Kingdom Hearts 2.8 and Tales of Berseria. “Now I’m fucked for the week,” that employee said. “Now I have to sell way more pre-owned this week.”
“Circle of Life” has long been a buzzword at GameStop, which makes the bulk of their profits off sales of pre-owned games and hardware, much to the dismay of video game publishers. In GameStop’s eyes, the transaction of video games is meant to be circular: You buy a game, trade it in and use the extra cash to buy another game — ideally pre-owned.
Over the past few years, GameStop has gone through a number of policies to encourage pre-orders and reward card subscriptions, so some employees are hoping that the Circle of Life program will soon go away. But for now, it’s leading to a lot of stress.
“This has all been under the guise of ‘doing better for the customer’ and ‘giving the customer what they want/a better value’ which is definitely not true,” said a GameStop employee. “Why would I get reserves if it’s going to lead to a new sale? Why would I sell you a new game that you’re excited about if it’s going to hurt my numbers at the end of the day? Why would I sell you a new system if I’m going to be fired for doing so? It doesn’t make sense.”
Comments
75 responses to “New GameStop Program Leads Employees To Lie To Customers”
I fucking hate this shit.
As much as I agree with you, you can’t blame them. If you were upper management, beholden to investors/shareholders, how would you compete in an age that seems to be going all digital? These guys are pretty much second hand dealers and just as shady.
easy, sell digital copies of said games.
What is bullshit is, i will happily walk in and purchase a new games and they prevent even taking a profit.
Im also well enough enough that i can be snobby and turn my nose up at some one else second hand game. – and pre owned titles are old shitty games anyway that are usually played on release and in a multiplayer world – useless 6 months later (or in battlefronts case – 6 days.
I also like to hoard my collections, even if i never play them again, so i dont trade either.
So under no circumstance would i buy anything but a new item if its what i wanted.
They lose people like me as customers and im sure their share holders arent happy about lost revenue
The trouble is, when they sell a new game retail, they only get a tiny portion of that price as profit. Most of the money from the game goes to the producers and the distributors. When they discovered second-hand game sales, it basically saved them going the way of Game. Even companies like Gametraders cannot get by on game sales alone. They’ve had to move the majority of their trade into gaming peripherals, accessories, collectables and non-electronic gaming. Second-hand games they can buy for a fraction of what they would pay a distributor, and sell at a price only a fraction shy of the new version. That is all profit there. That is how they stay in business. It’s also why EB Games/Gamestop have dramatically reduced their PC game sales areas. Those games are almost invariably one-off purchases due to DRM systems. Once it’s bought, it won’t be coming back in through their doors (and out, and in, and out, and in…). It’s lost profit that could instead be directed at a console sale that will more often than not result in more profit for them in the future.
Gamestop companies are directed at a particular customer market. And sadly, it’s not the market that involves people like you and me.
Yeah, but when they don’t sell those games, they make no profit. What use is there in having a bunch of new games sitting in the back of the store if you’re not going to sell them?
Frankly, when you buy physical discs these days, you might as well be buying a digital copy, given that you’re probably going to have to download the entire fucking game size in day one patches.
ahahaha so true.
On the xbone, all the disc does is pass the DRM.
It appears to fully load the game hdd side.
Fallout 4 was a 58gb install and a 11gb download.
The reason i go digital is because of the gold share feature. Dont need two copies for a game. even if box one has the disc, box two needs it also – not with digital.
That am im pushing mid 30’s. Who has the time to be up and down off the lounge swapping discs a couple of times a week.
If I was a bricks and mortar retailer trying to compete against digital then I’d want the experience of going into one of my stores to be as positive as possible for the consumer. This is pretty much the opposite.
Its a major shift in corporate culture to go from a traditional store (buy something and go) to a service-centric experience (almost like the apple stores) complementing an online store.
It also means alot of the smaller stores have to close, major restructure of the company, sacking staff etc etc….
Therefore, it will happen but you can garantee they’ll be kicking and screaming and doing anything but in the process
This is why I’d rather buy a physical copy from a JB or Big W because they have more than one line of products. Pay money, get product, leave store.
I don’t need to feel like I’m in an outer suburban pawn brokers trying to offload a bunch of fake watches.
EB Games is just this decades cash convertors.
I feel sorry for the staff.
I get shitty when they wont leave me the fuck alone when i am perusing for 5 minutes peace away from the wife and children and i get asked who where what when why and how.
– even after saying im just browsing.
Poor bastards are just trying to feed their kids and keep the lights on.
Well not all of them… there is one bitch at the gungahlin store in canberra.
In the middle of asking why they sold my pre-order elite controller 18 months ago – after she spent 5 minutes telling me she couldnt wait to go home and play with hers – and i would have to wait until batch 2 expected 8 weeks later – i said the customers should come before the staff and she said ‘i dont have time for hypotheticals, have a good day sir’ and started a convo with the next in line.
I think one of their displays fell over on the way out from memory
A few phone calls to head office and my orders were transferred to another store.
side note: anyone know anything about the surveys? i only get them for good interactions.
The poor interactions i would love to blast the staff for an i never get one.
Lol… I know exactly what and who you mean…
For a start, they could base their performance metrics on the how much profit the employee brings in.
By all means reward them for selling pre-owned games, but if a customer is going to either purchase a new game or nothing at all, then you’d hope the incentives for the sales staff encourage them to make the sale.
That’s the thing, they are! They are trying to get employees to push more profitable items. I guess the numbers are very similar between “new sale” and “no sale”, so it’s makes sense to have employees do everything to push pre-owned. I still think it’s disgusting as a consumer.
I’m sure they make some profit off of new games. My point was that if a pre-owned game sale brings in 5 times as much money, then it might make sense to reward a sales staff member who sells 5 new titles the same as one who sells a single pre-owned game. That should be enough to convince staff that it’s in their best interest to push the pre-owned titles, since they can make more money for less work.
But if a customer has ruled out purchasing a pre-owned game, there is something seriously wrong with the incentive structure if it is in the staff’s best interest to discourage the sale.
This only works in the bizarre fantasy world of retail businesses who will be bankrupt in a few years. The reality is, you can’t control the amount of customers who enter the store. And when it comes to businesses that deal heavily with predominately male customer bases, you can rarely convince them to add extras to their purchase.
Men anecdotally come into a store for a specific purpose, knowing what they are going to buy, and not being interested in anything else. They want a distinctly different retail experience to the “say hello to the customer and then harass them every 2 minutes and try to push extra purchases onto them” tactic.
EB Games, Gamestop, Roger David, etc. Need to actually do some research about their core demographic’s wants and needs and not just apply a one size fits all model to their customer service and business operation.
If Gamestop loves pre-owned games so much, and profits hugely from them, they should pivot their business model to solely deal in pre-owned products. That way the staff are happy, the customer is happy, and the bosses are happy.
I don’t generally buy pre-owned games either, but I understand why GameStop would want to sell them to customers.
My point is that it seems crazy to structure the incentive scheme such that refusing a sale is more valuable to the sales staff than making a sale of a new game.
I dunno. I walked into a Roger David for a shirt and was convinced to walk out with a shirt, pants and almost a pair of shoes
The sales assistant was pretty h— helpful.
were the only numbers she gave you the ones that showed up on the till?
Obviously you sell then pre-owned games, exactly like the customer wants.
I have never and will never buy a pre-owned game. Nothing against people that do, I just hate the idea of it.
I used to buy pre-owned if it was the only way to get a game (eg if it was old or had only been released in limited numbers). But that’s not an issue now that everything is available digitally,so I haven’t bought pre-owned for years.
Red Dead Redemption was my only pre owned choice – and thats because i waited for my new GOTY edition from ebay.
So i paid and played a preowned until it arrived.
Thanks EB
I also just bought a pre-owned Red Dead Redemption haha. $6 at Cashies!
Really? You hate the idea of buying a pre-owned game? We’re not talking about a air of undies here.
I buy pre-owned if I the value proposition is there for the purchase. As in, if a new version of the game is $80, and the pre-owned is $50……I’ll grab a pre-owned game….so long as there is no dlc I’m missing out on.
Buying pre-owned Wii games for our family Wii U was a great past time for me and the kids. They absolutely loved it and it cost me next to nothing.
I am aware that it doesn’t really coincide with logical thought but I’ve never liked the idea of pre-owned (loved) anything. It just makes me weirdly uncomfortable.
So unless the house you live in, or the car you drive weren’t brand new when you purchased them I can only assume that you’re in a constant living hell.
Well, actually I just moved into a newly built house a little over a month ago.
Nice of y’all to jump down my throat for sharing my preference without ever offending anyone.
I don’t think anyone is jumping down your throat, but you are coming off as a bit of a princess in the ivory tower type – saying you ‘hate’ the idea of pre-owned games.
All right then.
As I said before, there’s no logical reason behind it. Just the way I feel.
I apologize if I came off as a jerk. I was just trying to make the point that that point of view doesn’t make sense to me. Some people can only afford second-hand, and would otherwise go without. Not to mention you can actually find some really great stuff with a bit of hunting.
About 10-12 years ago I worked at a recycling plant, one day I saw one of the other guys find some Polystyrene foam packaging. He took it off the line, opened it up and inside was an NES complete with Controllers, Cables and there was even a game in the slot. I Couldn’t believe it.
It’s amazing what people throw away.
Accepted.
Like I said, I don’t turn my nose up at anyone who does purchase second-hand for any reason whatsoever.
That’s a solid find. I might shirk my rule for a classic console =P. Despite all that I have said, my wife is a bargain hunter (and mild hoarder.. sigh.) So a lot of things through out house are in fact second-hand.
When you a buy a pre-owned game, nothing goes to the developers who created that game, or even to the publisher. All profit from resale goes directly into the hands of retailer. You end up with a situation where game creators can only sell an individual copy once, but retailer can effectively recycle the same copy indefinitely. This is exploitative to developers (by retailer), and is the reason why some people refuse to buy pre-owned games.
Now, I’m not insisting you need to share that viewpoint – you have every right to buy pre-owned games. I’m just outlining why some people find personal distaste in this business model at brick-and-mortar stores. 🙂
I completely understand wanting to support the developers/creators. I know it’s not a game, but a few years ago I bought a second-hand copy of Tucker & Dale Vs Evil. I knew nothing about it, but the cover looked like it’d be alright, and it was cheap enough, so I decided to take a punt. I watched it and man was it great, but then I felt bad because I knew none of the money I spent on it went to the creators, so I gave it away to a workmate and bought a brand new copy for myself.
Moral of the story: Watch Tucker & Dale Vs Evil. Seriously, it’s the best horror/comedy I’ve ever seen, besides Shaun Of The Dead that is.
I wonder if this filters through to EB Games here in Australia given they are essentially the same company at the top level.
I rarely if ever buy pre-owned becauae the prices often don’t justify it.
Seems to be. I picked up Dishonored 2 when it was on sale @ EB last week and was “helpfully ” offered a pre-owned copy for $50 instead of the $36 brand new copy.
EB and GameStop have an already long history of questionable practices.
The amount of times EB employees have lied to my face regarding trade ins and price matching is beyond accidental, the similar excuses they present shows there is a purposeful culture of misinformation used against consumers.
EB refused to sell me the copy of ‘the new order’ i order from their site to store.
It was $19 and new.
They had pre-owned for 34 and thats what i was told i would have to buy.
even though they sent me an sms confirming my order was ‘ready for collection’
They said because they had the pre owned in stock, the system wont let them have a new one ordered in.
I asked them to price match and they said no.
So yeah, as i said further up before, back to ebay.
Agreed, which is why I buy pre-owned from little thrift stores. They usually go for $2-3.
Used to work at EB. We always had it beaten over our head that we had a target for preowned games. One difference was that we would override the sale of any preowned title to be $5 cheaper than any new items if they were actually cheaper than the preowned game. Doesn’t feel good to fuck over customers and we didn’t like doing it so we would do whatever we could to get them a good deal. We’d always price match for good customers sometimes even if they didn’t ask for it and we would always encourage them to make use of our return policy.
I was wondering that. I haven’t noticed in my local, but I buy most of my games on PC so preowned isn’t an option. I have noticed as someone else said that the PC section has got smaller and smaller, and moved right to the back of the shop, in recent years.
KPI Culture continuing to harm the consumer and suffocate the employees.
I agree.. which manager came up with these metrics? (they aren’t even beneficial to the company!)
Why not just measure dollars earned on behalf of the company? (and reward high achievers).
Rewards are often a better incentive than anything else – I think I’m generalizing terribly but:
It seems that in stores that have shopfront sales, its like they don’t think the employee’s can be trusted (I think it has something to do with the age of employees) – so the whip-cracking method is used to drive sales.
If you compare this to most other sales jobs where the demographic of employee is older (think car sales) they work on commission = a reward for doing your job well…
Yeah, these metrics are…questionable at least. I work for a company that has multiple large call centers (though I’m not in the call center myself), and all the KPIs make sense. You receive commission on particular products they want you to push, but you also have a general EoM bonus that’s based on sensible metrics like overall sales, adherence, NPS, etc. They’re simple metrics focused on, essentiall, “how many sales did you make full stop?” Good employees are rewarded for doing their job. They don’t have to twist and turn to meet bizarre KPIs.
The only thing I can think of, and I still disagree, is that Gamestop make far more money on used game/hardware sales and trade-ins than they do new games/consoles. In their eyes, they’re encouraging staff to sell more high margin items. Problem is, the way they’re doing it means they’re discouraging a number of sales full stop. Wouldn’t you rather make some money on lower margin products than push high margin products but not sell anything? Low margin is better than no margin, which is what’s going to happen when Gamestop piss off their consumers more than they have already.
KPI’s are fine as long as they’re meaningful and SMART, which these measures clearly aren’t.
It’s practices like this though that give KPI’s and measured performance a bad name…. Usually a side effect of having people influencing upper management who have degrees in business/workforce management but no practical experience or concept of real world efficiencies and practice, coming up with numbers that look good on paper but aren’t practical in the real world, and having no actual responsibility for the implementation of policy ie if it fails it’s the line-managers and frontlines staff fault for not doing their jobs, not the fact that the metric and numbers are fundamentally flawed.
Yeah measuring performance on % of sales rather than raw cash coming in is ridiculous. Like we didn’t make $1000 on new games this week because it would skew our pie chart of pre-owned and trades. Smrt.
I feel for the employees in this situation. A lifetime ago, I worked for the CD/DVD store Sanity, which also had demands to push pre-orders/cleaning kits/loyalty cards. I couldn’t even imagine having to deal with also trying to convince your customers to buy a high level of pre-owned stock.
As much as it’s easy (and fun) to bash EB/GS for these practices, it more shows the demise of brick and mortar game store. The push for more sales to come from “store controlled commodities” as opposed to “supplied controlled commodities” would be a requirement to make a profit.
Look at where you could buy games from ten years ago: EB games, GAME, Game Traders MYER audio visual, Sanity (they did dip a toe into selling games, it was a failure), JB HiFi, Target, Big W, Kmart etc. Out of those places, GAME and Game Traders are all but gone and Sanity, MYER and K-Mart got out of the game business. I wouldn’t be shocked if all department stores remove games over the next decade leaving EB, who survive on pre-owns and trade-ins and JB HiFi, which is currently turning a profit somehow, but I wonder how long they can sustain growth with the amount of retail space they give to CD/DVD/game products.
In 15 years, the only options we will have will be digital games/web only stores.
Edit for grammar/spelling
Lets hope that 15 years is actually only 5.
The world does not need hard copy games anymore.
the plastic, the waste, everything – if only digital sales reflected the bricks and mortar in pricing….
While servers + cooling systems are powered by fossil fuels it’s up in the air whether digital is actually better for the environment or not.
To be honest, that hadn’t even crossed my mind.
Thanks for the food for thought.
Really? – You doubt that a few(even lots) of servers hosting the downloads (which already exist) produce more waste than all the processing + shipping + excess that is then put in the ground?
Keep in mind: the servers hosting this can probably service tens of thousands of users over their lifetime
Haven’t read it all (written by an ecologist) – but basically the endnote here is – Digital is better:
http://www.polygon.com/2015/7/9/8921205/digital-or-physical-the-case-for-the-environmental-impact-of-our
Note: in AUS the speed of the internet obviously plays a part! (in convenience anyway)
I disagree. It comes down to how long your vision is, and whether you’re interested in short-term environmental change or long term. Same with people saying that electric cars aren’t environmentally friendly because we still use fossil fuel to produce electricity.
In the future, we can change our energy generation to nuclear, solar, wind or hydro, but doing so won’t change how our cars run. If they were fossil fuel before, they’ll still be fossil fuel. But if things take electricity that (for now) is generated by fossil fuel, when we swap to something cleaner down the line then everything that runs off the grid benefits.
Looking to cars, if we said that there’s no point in swapping to electric now because our generators are clean, and then swapped to clean energy in 15 years time, and only started swapping then, then in 20 years time electric cars would still be a minority, 25 years time we’d start to see a real shift and in 35 years time we’d still see fossil fueled cars kicking around. However, if we swapped now then in 15 years time when we go clean generation, the shift to clean powered cars would be much quicker.
Just my 2c
Maybe I’m a bit backwards buy I only buy hard copy games.
Games are 50gb these days, I’m on the NBN but Xbox One download speeds are awful, about 1mb/s, takes 13 hours to download!
1Mb, or 1MB?
I’m also on NBN and the fastest speed I’ve got through my Xbone is roughly 13Mb/s. Yeah, it’s a pain, and I do like to have hard copies on my shelf that I can display and arrange alphabetically, but in todays world space in the home is at a premium.
Also, if you pre-buy games digitally you can pre-load, so it’s ready to go at midnight (a whole 9 hours before the store opens), not to mention the extra time you have to wait for updates to download after getting a hard copy home before you can play.
Also, in regards to @snowee, I think an all digital future is much closer than 15 years away. The start of the all digital world (for gaming at least) will begin when the Xbone, PS4 and Switch are at the end of their lifecycle and their successors are released. So in about 4-5 years.
Dammit! @snoweee
Not sure of the difference, 1 megabyte per second I guess! It’s annoying because it ‘says’ it’s downloading at 10 mbs on the xbox games screen but the downloaded amount only goes up by 0.01gb every 10 seconds or so!
Pre-loading is cool but I don’t buy games on day one anymore. It’s probably why I prefer hard copies because they seem to drop in price quicker than the digital price does!
Ok, this is how it works, to the best of my knowledge There’s 8 Megabits (Mb) in a Megabyte (MB), 1 Gigabyte (GB) is 1024 Megabytes (MB). So if you’re getting speeds of 1 Megabyte (MB) a second (8 Megabits), it should take approximately 1024 Seconds (roughly 17 minutes) to download a 1 Gigabyte (GB) file, which equates to just over 14 hours for a 50 Gigabyte (GB) game.
Hopefully that makes sense to you.
That’s good to know, thanks! Yeah so my Xbox downloads would be at 1MB/s but the displayed speed on the game screen must be in Mb/s! Makes sense now!
The 1024 MB/GB is only for memory. Storage didn’t need the base 2 stuff so became standardized as 1000MB/GB to be less confusing I think.
My bad, didn’t realize that. Thanks for clearing it up.
Even though I have been forced to go digital on PC, I’m still reluctant on consoles. I’ve heard too many stories of people getting reported and having their account banned with “no recourse of appeal” which means all your digital purchases are gone. This is on PS so I don’t know what it’s like on Xbox. At least if you have the disc you can still create a new account and play the game. Maybe I’m just being a little paranoid.
JB are smart because they’re basically running physical copies out of a general electronics store. I know that their games range gets me in there and then I remember that I need a waffle iron or a bunch of cheap movies. I bought a TV there recently as well and I’m sure deep down it’s because I consider myself a JB Hi-Fi customer that likes their brand.
I agree, that’s their pitch. But as you say, you now consider yourself a JB customer, but if they eventually phased out/ minimalised their small ticket items, you’ll still nip down to your local JB when you need a fridge next. They will eventually pull a Dick Smith and ditch their loss-leaders in favour of big ticket items.
I guess that too considering the number of JB’s that are branding themselves JB HOME, but still carry their traditional small electronics and entertainment products.
JB usually seem about $10 cheaper than EB Games too!
Fellow Sanity survivor here and this article dredged up some bad memories as well. The pressure from up high to push those ridiculous disc/player cleaners or whatever terrible movie or album pre-order the company was being paid to promote that month was all consuming.
I was also around for their games experiment and could tell from the beginning it was going to fall over in a screaming heap. It was painfully clear that upper management had no clue what they were getting into and didn’t understand the games industry at all, to the point where Brett Blundy himself declared that no Sanity store would stock any game with a rating higher than M. There were some really good content managers at head office that were made scapegoats for the whole thing failing and left feeling pretty burned not long after. I ended up moving to the online store after a couple of years in physical stores and was privy to the push to get games back on the radar, but ONLY through the online store. That has been up and running for the last 4 years and was chugging along pretty nicely by the time I left for far greener pastures, but that’s because the proposal was this time put together by folks in the online department who actually knew the industry they were getting into, instead of upper management attempting to expand for expansion’s sake and not bothering to do anything more than cursory industry research.
There was a former Blockbuster Video who chimed in on that reddit thread linked in the article, citing eerie similarities to both the processes introduced and the tactics managers are using to deal with it while justifying retaining their part-time staff… and yea… I don’t think I’ve even seen a Blockbuster store in 5+ years.
B&M entertainment retail is dying as the industry moves to digital distribution and on-demand streaming services.
My eyes actually glazed over the indigestible amount of corporatese that their official response was. Pretty sure that if I wasted my morning trying to parse each sentence, I’d find out that they were literally saying nothing at all.
Also, if they discourage the sale of new games, where will the pre-owned games of the future come from? No way in hell they’ll get a good critical mass from pre-orders alone. This system is parasitic of their own future.
From basically every other outlet that sells games and doesn’t trade. They can suck in externally procured product for cheap and sell it for an incredible mark-up.
Ah right. Tsk.
Horrid.
I have quite a lot of faith in the EB Games stores I go to (Indooroopilly, Mt Ommaney) because they have always been honest and decent with every transaction.
But seriously… did you need to read this to know that you shouldn’t be shopping in Bricks ‘n Mortar stores anymore?
The other big problem is that in Oz we are paying over inflated wholesale prices for games so to compete stores have to take smaller profits on new games. We use to import games from Asia (legit not bootleg) and the US (Same exact game) and we were selling them usually $5 cheaper than Australian wholesale prices and still making a good profit.
i get that they receive more profit from second hand games etc but they seem to prefer customers walking out the door buying nothing
I wont buy pre-owned purely because it fully pisses me off that I trade my game for the amazing price of $7 towards another product, I then see my ex game on the shelf the next day for $49.95(2 week hold before selling, my arse!) or $12 and then the pre owned copy(my ex) is $69.95(both true stories).500/600/700% profit! just doesn’t sit right with me, makes me feel pretty ripped off!!