Gamestop, For Better or Worse

Gamestop is evil. At least that is the premise of a recent article on Next-Gen by Colin Campbell. While I don't agree with everything he has to say on the subject, I have been more than frustrated with the franchise in the recent past, leading me to personally boycott the retailer. From becoming the last , "lucky" person to get a copy of Halo 3 on day one without a pre-order and not being able to get Guitar Hero III, only to walk into Best Buy and see palettes of them throughout the store, I couldn't understand why people still shop there. Apparently, many people still do if their holiday season is anything to go by.

As someone who works at a publisher, it is very easy to get riled up by their practices. We get the short end of the stick when they base their entire model after the used games market. This allows them to keep their initial orders low while reaping the profits off of every resale and no incentive to place future orders once the initial rush for a game dies down. Since they do place such small orders, consumers have been trained to ensure that they've given them their five bucks months in advance in order to reserve their own copy. This all but kills niche and risky titles as they stick to the safe bets of franchises and licensed games.

My coworkers aren't making things any better. In QA we get all of the games we work on. Usually, these copies are instantly traded in for credit or a new game. For the local Gamestop, there is probably little to no incentive to place orders for our games if they know that they are going to get numerous "new" copies that they can sell as used. We are hurting our own company. Although there is probably nothing that will change in the near future to alleviate this problem, I have taken it upon myself to only buy new and from big box retailers who have a tendency to keep things in stock and have sales that make new games cheaper. And I call for others in the industry to do the same.

On the other hand, while at lunch with some friends the other day, one of them was complaining that Gamestop essentially lost one of his five dollar pre-orders. As it is, there is no way to manage your pre-orders unless you go into the store and have the clerk print out a list of your pre-orders. I thought, that in this era of MySpace and FaceBook, that Gamestop should have some kind of social network where you could create wish list, manage your pre-orders and share those lists with friends. Seems like it would be fairly easy to implement and would be kind of cool. But I still won't shop there.

Gamestop seems to be a necessary evil in the industry as the continue to garner more strength and clout in the industry, even if it is only in their best interest. The only thing that we, the content creators can do is go on the offensive. We can shift our buying habits and encourage others to do the same. All the while looking for alternate means of getting our games into the hands of gamers, either through digital downloads or demos that they can try before forking out for a game that he or she may want to quickly return, which is the subject of my next rant.