Many will remember the retailer GAME as the ones who halted the supply of retro to their sister store Gamestation. Today they're about to do the very same to their modern gaming customers. Reports suggest that they will not be stocking Mass Effect 3 or indeed any EA title past SSX.
There was a double hit as later in the day it was revealed that Mario Party 9 would not be available and a rumor that Nintendo itself could pull out. This could spell a grim future for GAME as consumer confidence takes a hit and customers choose other sources to get their pre-orders.
If anything the general outlook for the major UK based retailer has been looking grim for quite some time, with this news coming as no surprise. The reluctance to acknowledge digital game sales and the potential profit to be had in stocking retro games just goes to show how out of touch GAME are with their customers.
GAME have stated the following as a gesture of goodwill:
Customers who have pre-ordered in store, will have the opportunity to add £5 worth of Reward points to their card if they visit us from today through to 16 March 2012.
Customers who have placed a deposit for the title will receive refund as well as the £5 worth of Reward points between 1 and 16 March 2012.
Customers who have pre-ordered online, will be provided with an online voucher to the value of £5 to be spent on any purchase on our sites.
The story was broken earlier today by Eurogamer who have secured a memo which shows that FIFA Street 3, Tiger Woods 13 and Sims 3 Showtime will also not be stocked by GAME Group. Shares in the company fell by 15% following the EA announcement
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Comments
This in turn means that Gamestation who are also owned by Game should be quaking in their boots, though no mention about them not stocking Mass Effect has hit any headlines... Having a quick look on Gamestation's site there is no listing for ME3, take from that what you will.
On the plus side, there is also news of Game Stop looking to announce a take over bid. While I generally consider them a little too evil for my liking after reading so many horror stories of the American stores, I am sure they were a phenomenally small percentage of customers.
I am lead to believe that Game Stop is relatively cheap too. So it might not be all bad, and they might stock some good gems
2 years after I started Game was running Gamestation and I remember having to tape up boxes and boxes of "useless" stock which was all retro. Effectively one of Gamestation's appealing aspects was shunted out.
As heartbreaking as this will sound, I remember a night in which I had to "write off" a load of PS1 stock. We had to sit there all night finding the game, breaking the disk and adjusting the stock figures.
We had huge attachment rate goals which were unreasonable and if anything drove customers away.
Its a shame Gamestation went the way it did, Im just glad I got out when I could.
But its a real shame, apart from various flea markets or gaming fairs (like the awesome Replay event), if you wanted a place to buy retro hardware and software, then Gamestation was the place to go, I remember the one in South Shields had a huge Retro stock, they had Mega Drives, SNES's, NES's, even on one occasion I spotted one of those rare QuickShot Supervisions (they wanted close to £100 for it though), but thanks to GAME, that's no longer the case
I simply cannot understand GAME's attitude towards the Retro community, surely they must understand that there is a large group of people that are super keen on older systems and games but alas, unless its PS2 or later (and even those games are being phased out despite new games still coming out for it) they are not interested
Fortunatley after a bit of trawling I've bagged a copy from an on-line retailer for the retail price, but after the same happended to me with THE LAST STORY Collectors Edition recently which I also had pre-ordered via GAME, I will not be pre-ordering any games from them (or Gamestation) any more.
http://www.graingergames.co.uk/
Found this. A lot should be taken with a pinch of salt, but bad news