Is Gamestop Evil? The Good, The Bad and The Ugly

[Jmustang1968]

I am in agreement with noise here. Gamestop does somethings that annoy me, primarily the gutting of games. But their selection at times can't be beat for slightly older current gen games. Most of my business with them is preorders and midnight releases. I feel like I am helping to support developers by preordering their games. To me it is like voting for the games I like so they will make more like it in the future. Atlus comes to mind here. I preorder almost every atlus game from gs or amazon.

It is easy to hate on gs when one doesn't buy many new games or any at all... gs can be annoying and I don't agree with all of their policies, but they are convenient and reliable.

[Pichu]

I love video games, and I shop at Gamestop, and I'm proud of both. (Of course, I get my retro games and last gen games elsewhere)

[MrPopo]

Speaking of harming videogames, I wish more developers/publishers had online stores that we could purchase their games directly from.

That works if they offer digital distribution. Shipping out physical copies has a significant cost that small developers can't handle, and large publishers don't want to deal with since they're already in every major store.

But it seems like their profit margins would still be higher? Maybe not with the costs of running said online store. There are just some companies I wouldn't mind giving an extra few dollars. Q Entertainment comes to mind for me personally...

I've spent the last 4.5 years working at Amazon in the fulfillment software dvision, so I am extremely familiar with running an online store.

So the thing about running an online store is that you have to have a warehouse somewhere with all your product and you have to have people in that warehouse to receive an order from the website, grab the product, box it up, and get it shipped out. The cost of running a warehouse includes both a fixed daily cost (rent, utilities) as well as a variable cost per unit (associate salaries are hourly, but they might do different numbers of units in a day).

The way it gets shipped out will depend on your expected daily volume. In Amazon's case we have regularly scheduled UPS and FedEx trucks that leave with a bunch of shipments every day. Some days they will be completely full, other days they won't be. The online store for game developer X would probably not have such consistent volume. They'd probably have a huge burst of orders at the release of new product Y, but after that they're going to have a slow trickle. This would impact their ability to get favorable rates from the package carriers, as more consistent business is cheaper. And when I say slow trickle, I mean that for a smaller developer I could picture there be days where only a handful of units go out. The extreme variance between release day rates and regular rates would mean that they would probably need a few large trucks on release day and on other days it might be easier to send a guy in a pickup truck to the local FedEx depot.

This doesn't even get into the complexity of maintaining the software of an online ordering system. You can use something simple if you're expecting the aforementioned trickle of orders, but for release day you need something more sophisticated.

[Flodder450]

I believe we in holland have something alike to GameStop in the terms of pricing:
http://www.nedgame.nl/zoek/super%20mario%20bros/0/1/9/
€20 for SUper Mario Bros 2?!, they are insane!

[korn16ftl3]

yup. What can I say? I'm a complicated man, Inazuma. At least when the video game industry collapses you'll know who to blame.

i hope this happens soon so sick of all the stupid TOS's and corporations stripping already sold features out of something that we paid for and to top it all off these damn shovel ware titles are driving me INSANE

[CRTGAMER]

The Good
Anyone notice the new price tags at Gamestop? Its larger to show both price points for Power Rewards card holders. More importantly there is a real UPC right on the same price tag, so maybe now there will only be one price sticker to remove. I just bought a used Gamecube game and there is no sticker on the back, only the front sticker to deal with was easy to remove.

Silly me, I pulled the sticker before I took the pic. Well at least the sticker is easy to remove! Anyone notice the iconic RROD logo in the Gamestop Power Rewards card?

[BurningDoom]

yup. What can I say? I'm a complicated man, Inazuma. At least when the video game industry collapses you'll know who to blame.

i hope this happens soon so sick of all the stupid TOS's and corporations stripping already sold features out of something that we paid for and to top it all off these damn shovel ware titles are driving me INSANE

I hate it too, but it doesn't drive me insane. I just focus more on classic gaming. There are plenty of great games that I've missed. I only really pay attention to really great games when it comes to current-gen, like New Super Mario Bros. or Skyrim.

[CRTGAMER]

The Bad
You know the A Frame Racks that used to house PS2 games? Now that the PS2 library is compressed to yellow envelopes on under ten dollar games, I notice the Wii cases are now displayed there. A pain, one has to flip or pull a stack of cases to see all the titles in back. Not a big deal, it was just easier to look at the ends without having to finger fumble a stack of cases.

The Ugly
I alluded to this a while back. The Wii games are now where the PS2 games were. Piles and Piles! Yeah I know there is a bunch of shovelware, but there are also very good games on the Wii that are inexpensive. Geometry Wars, Elebits and Blastworks for example. Will the cheaper Wii games get the case toss out eventually?

[noiseredux]

^those pics always make me sad.

[Michi]

^those pics always make me sad.

Me too. But they're not all like that! Some of them still stock their shelves properly: