GAME in serious trouble

Beefy78

GCDLawstudent wrote: »

You humble opinion, while you are entitled to it, is completly wrong.

Firstly I love steam - buy all my PC games from it - it's WAY more expensive than buying from a retailer - especially for new releases. Steam are not a publisher so I've no idea what your talking about when you say shops wont stock steam merchandise.

Secondly EA wanted to fix PS3 games on release at €74.99 in Ireland. Collective presure from the bricks and mortor retailers stoped them. There was a further disagreement again with Fifa Street 2 (or 3 cant remember now) where GAME put it on sale at the proce EA insisted on - it didnt sell because no one else bowed to the publisher and EA were eventually forced to back down.

The games industry will eventually go completely online and direct with publishers charging what they want. There wont be any amazon, play etc as the publishers will bypass them. You'll buy your console in Dunnes hook it up and stick your credit card in and be paying €80 for the next elder scrolls game. The only thing that keeps prices down is competition.

Yep. And there'll be no second hand market to help with the cost either. I really think anyone celebrating the demise of bricks and mortar stores are incredibly short-sighted. I hope their vision for the future is right, but I fear that it won't be.

nerd69

nerd69 wrote: »

there not bending you over so just adding the necessary fees
pretty much everything is cheaper online i personally like to drive to the shops and have a look around and im not alone so there not dead iv been treated well in most game shops iv gon into be it game or gamestop

Not dead but if I see a game I want on the PS3 for 35 online and 50 instore then I'm not going to be heading home to order it. Don't care how nice or helpful the staff are, it's the price that matters to me. Sure a little human interaction is nice and a conversation is always appreciated but I'm not going to be paying a premium for that.

Pacing Mule

Deleted User wrote: »

Disregarding the cost of new releases, Game had they wanted to could have easily lowered the price on their preowned games. On numerous occasions I've been offered anything from 17-23 euro for a trade in which they would then stick on the shelf for 45. When trading in a few weeks back for my Vita I found HVM to be offering a hell of a lot more in credit aswell as selling them on much cheaper. I know people will say that HMV can make up the money in CD, DVD sales etc but at the same time had Game wanted to they could have reworked their pricing structure on preowned titles. If giving the seller 17 euro for a title why could they not sell that same title on for 30 or even 35 euro. Even with such a price drop Game would still be making one hell of a profit on those games.

There is a mistake a lot of people make when they assume the price they are offered taken from the current sale price of their item is the stores profit. The game being sold for €45 may have been traded in for €35 credit. Then as the average cost price of the traded in stock falls (from your lower trade in offers of subsequent trade ins of the same game) then you can reduce the retail price of that game. It's rarely as simple as store has no stock of a pre owned game - customer comes in - gets offered a price which is them immediately marked up by €25 etc.

Helix

nerd69 wrote: »

there not bending you over so just adding the necessary fees
pretty much everything is cheaper online i personally like to drive to the shops and have a look around and im not alone so there not dead iv been treated well in most game shops iv gon into be it game or gamestop

the fees arent necessary though, you dont have to pay those fees online

they're additional costs that are becoming less and less necessary in the current marketplace. why pay more when you can save money like? are people that lonely that they need to go into stores for human interaction?

Pageant Messiah

Pageant Messiah wrote: »

There is a mistake a lot of people make when they assume the price they are offered taken from the current sale price of their item is the stores profit. The game being sold for €45 may have been traded in for €35 credit. Then as the average cost price of the traded in stock falls (from your lower trade in offers of subsequent trade ins of the same game) then you can reduce the retail price of that game. It's rarely as simple as store has no stock of a pre owned game - customer comes in - gets offered a price which is them immediately marked up by €25 etc.

I'm well aware of how pricing in these stores work, I managed a Music/DVD/Game store in the past.

I'm talking here of recent release not games that have been out for awhile. I know someone who was offered 24 euro for Mass Effect 3 the Tuesday after it was released, it was on the shelf preowned for 45. Now I have my doubts that the trade in price depreciated by 10 or 15 euro over the course of a few days. The same guy was offered 17 for the new SSX the week after it was released, he took it to HMV where he got close to 30 euro credit for it. When I was trading in a few games just over a week and a half ago the trade-in credit Game offered was substantially less than HMV and far lower than their resale price. These were all recent releases, the oldest was at the time a month old.

nerd69

Helix wrote: »

the fees arent necessary though, you dont have to pay those fees online

they're additional costs that are becoming less and less necessary in the current marketplace. why pay more when you can save money like? are people that lonely that they need to go into stores for human interaction?

hehe well have to agree to disagree to be fair i dont buy many games new anyway i tend to wait till they drop anyway

Beefy78

Deleted User wrote: »

I'm well aware of how pricing in these stores work, I managed a Music/DVD/Game store in the past.

I'm talking here of recent release not games that have been out for awhile. I know someone who was offered 24 euro for Mass Effect 3 the Tuesday after it was released, it was on the shelf preowned for 45. Now I have my doubts that the trade in price depreciated by 10 or 15 euro over the course of a few days. The same guy was offered 17 for the new SSX the week after it was released, he took it to HMV where he got close to 30 euro credit for it. When I was trading in a few games just over a week and a half ago the trade-in credit Game offered was substantially less than HMV and far lower than their resale price. These were all recent releases, the oldest was at the time a month old.

But people were paying those pre-owned prices. Two thirds of the store were pre-owned in recent times so they weren't struggling to get people to trade in at that level of credit. It was exactly those margins which were allowing GAME to take losses on new games and to stay alive the last few months.

Yes, they made a huge mark-up on them. That isn't greed though and it isn't what has caused them to fail. It's easy enough to buy and sell second hand without going to GAME or HMV.

VinLieger

Helix wrote: »

people wont pay 80 per game

Where were you 6-7 years ago?

Procrastastudy

Helix wrote: »

the fees arent necessary though, you dont have to pay those fees online

they're additional costs that are becoming less and less necessary in the current marketplace. why pay more when you can save money like? are people that lonely that they need to go into stores for human interaction?

No but there are people who need help and guidance and prefer an actual shop. The correct approach to be fair is online retail fusion where you have shops in major cities. In Ireland that would be one in Dublin, Cork and maybe Waterford / out midlands way. You then offer all the service of a shop but keep you over heads down.

GAME failed very hard here in that they kept the retail and online businesses seperate. I have no problem paying a reasonable mark up on a product. I always shop where I get the best service rather then the best price. Thats why personally I use steam even given the extra expense. I object to anti-competative loss leading deals - in the long term they do no one any good. You only need look at the WAL-Mart phenonanom.

EDIT: Having over 600 stores was also madness - in some shopping centres in the UK there were 3 stores woned by the same company!

ghostchant

One thing that online purchasing will never replace for me is purchasing hardware. I've twice bought new hardware that has turned out to be faulty. One was a 3DS bought in Gamestop, that I brought back the same day and got an immediate replacement. The other was a phone that I bought off a prominent website, and was left twiddling my thumbs for over a week before getting a working one.

Now maybe someday I won't have a choice, or consoles as we know them today will be different (On Live, Gaikai and others I'm probably not aware of), but until then I'll pay an extra few quid for the customer service and ease in returning goods.

dpe

Fussgangerzone wrote: »

IMHO, it's the high-street retailers that have been pushing up the prices of downloadable games for years. When the likes of steam try and sell one of their own games for a lot less money than a boxed game, the retailers threaten to not stock their merchandise.

Also, the download sector is getting a lot more competitive with, EA, Amazon and even GOG.com getting in on the action. My money says prices will drop, but not a whole pile.

Of course "charge as much as you can get away with" is still part of retail, so who knows what way it'd go? At least the people who make the games would be getting a few quid every time, unlike with Game's resales.

Rubbish. Steam new release prices are generally the MOST expensive for PC games on Day 1, especially if you're paying in Euros. As for the whole threatening not to stock thing, also rubbish. It was an unsubstantiated rumour that became "truth" amongst fanboys, despite the fact that GAME had already pretty much pulled out of the PC market (one or half a bay in most stores) and had little or no leverage over publishers to pull that kind of stunt anyway.

If you want to point the finger at someone threatening Valve over prices, look at EA, who have the distribution rights for Valve's boxed games business, and who've also been busily pulling EA titles from Steam to put onto Origin. This is the problem with the download platforms at the moment, there's no one-stop shop to buy everything (mainly thanks to EA and Microsoft) and little or no price competition outside of sales. This is a problem across all online media, with Amazon dominating ebooks, Apple dominating MP3 and Steam dominating PC, none of them face credible competition to keep prices down, especially in Steam's case.

jill_valentine

GCDLawstudent wrote: »

Having over 600 stores was also madness - in some shopping centres in the UK there were 3 stores woned by the same company!

That's what did for them in the end. They expanded when they shouldn't have, and couldn't close the new branches they took on.

Dumping the Irish stores is an attempt to preserve the UK business as an attractive proposition, but that doesn't reflect the viability of those individual stores. Many of them were still profitable, preowned pricing, pc section, downloads and all.

Beefy78

Beefy78 wrote: »

But people were paying those pre-owned prices. Two thirds of the store were pre-owned in recent times so they weren't struggling to get people to trade in at that level of credit. It was exactly those margins which were allowing GAME to take losses on new games and to stay alive the last few months.

Yes, they made a huge mark-up on them. That isn't greed though and it isn't what has caused them to fail. It's easy enough to buy and sell second hand without going to GAME or HMV.

It didn't cause them to fail but had they looked at a repricing structure of preowned titles then they would have had a better chance to survive. people are more likely to spend more if they get more for their money. I know that I'd faster spent 90 euro on three games than I would 2. The reason Game failed is because they never diversified and the cost of their new release titles was nearly always greater than other store. I don't think I ever bought a new release in Game as a quick walk around town and you were guaranteed to find that game for a minimum 5 euro less and in most cases as much as 10 or 15 euro cheaper. The biggest reason for Game's failure is that there was simply to many stores. Between Game and Gamestation, many town ins England would have 4 or 5 stores. When a company is struggling they should begin to close stores making the least amount of money and in the case of towns/cities with multiple stores, the store/stores producing the least profit should be the first to go.

I think that Game is a big loss as stores such as HMV can easily reduce the size of their game section if they notice a decline in the market but at the same time Game have no one but themselves to blame for their current situation.

jill_valentine

Deleted User wrote: »

The biggest reason for Game's failure is that there was simply to many stores. Between Game and Gamestation, many town ins England would have 4 or 5 stores. When a company is struggling they should begin to close stores making the least amount of money and in the case of towns/cities with multiple stores, the store/stores producing the least profit should be the first to go..

This is the critical problem that seems to be going bafflingly unremarked upon, so I'd like to explain this again for emphasis.

It wasn't a loss in profitability that closed these shops. When GameStation was bought, with the intention of closing down competing branches, the Monopolies and Mergers commission then ruled that they couldn't close any of the new outlets they'd acquired. Instead, they had to keep both Game and Gamestation operating in some semblance of competition with each other. So they ended up with, effectively, four branches on the same street in some places, and a massive, completely unsustainable portfolio in the UK.

That is what killed Game in Ireland. Not downloading. Not piracy. Not preowned. It was not the unprofitability of the model in use here in Ireland that brought them down - although that's an interesting and valid conversation, it's totally irrelevant to the conversation here.

What did for Game, ultimately and only, was a stupid decision by the higher ups, years ago, in the UK; one that backfired dramatically and slowly killed the company over a course of years.

dpe

Deleted User wrote: »

It didn't cause them to fail but had they looked at a repricing structure of preowned titles then they would have had a better chance to survive. people are more likely to spend more if they get more for their money. I know that I'd faster spent 90 euro on three games than I would 2. The reason Game failed is because they never diversified and the cost of their new release titles was nearly always greater than other store. I don't think I ever bought a new release in Game as a quick walk around town and you were guaranteed to find that game for a minimum 5 euro less and in most cases as much as 10 or 15 euro cheaper. The biggest reason for Game's failure is that there was simply to many stores. Between Game and Gamestation, many town ins England would have 4 or 5 stores. When a company is struggling they should begin to close stores making the least amount of money and in the case of towns/cities with multiple stores, the store/stores producing the least profit should be the first to go.

I think that Game is a big loss as stores such as HMV can easily reduce the size of their game section if they notice a decline in the market but at the same time Game have no one but themselves to blame for their current situation.

Ironically given recent events, that's because GAME always positioned itself as "the friend of the publisher". It was policy that they stuck to SRP and they stuck to release dates, until another retailer broke them, then they would price match. The idea was that discounts were always hidden below the line in Reward Points. Gamestop have always had a similar policy, which is understandable because specialists live or die (as we've seen) by their publisher relationships, whereas the likes of Argos or Tesco don't really give a damn.

Sarn

Pageant Messiah wrote: »

Older AAA titles like Gears 3 are still selling for €64.99. (€47.97 here incl delivery)

I see the point that is being made, but anyone paying that price at this stage would be crazy. Gears 3 can be picked up for £16 (just over €19) delivered from Zavvi. Bricks and mortar stores just can't compete with those prices.

Helix

VinLieger wrote: »

Where were you 6-7 years ago?

buying games online

where were you?

VinLieger

Helix wrote: »

buying games online

where were you?

Looking longingly at games on shelves as i didnt have access to a credit card and couldnt afford the 70 euro games, yet people did buy them as that is what they cost. I now buy exclusively online and shop around for the best price plus shipping but saying people wont pay 80 quid for games is ridiculous IF that is the only price you are able to get them for

Varik

GCDLawstudent wrote: »

Firstly I love steam - buy all my PC games from it - it's WAY more expensive than buying from a retailer - especially for new releases. Steam are not a publisher so I've no idea what your talking about when you say shops wont stock steam merchandise.

He probably got the idea about boycotts of Steamworks games when all those retailers said they would and when some did.

Firstly online digital retailers did for games that used steamworks which did go ahead as they were in direct competition with Steam.

Then threats from B&M retailers to boycotts followed, not sure anyone did anything in the end.

GCDLawstudent wrote: »

Secondly EA wanted to fix PS3 games on release at €74.99 in Ireland. Collective presure from the bricks and mortor retailers stoped them. There was a further disagreement again with Fifa Street 2 (or 3 cant remember now) where GAME put it on sale at the proce EA insisted on - it didnt sell because no one else bowed to the publisher and EA were eventually forced to back down.

First party Sony games were cheaper than the rest but there were a good few of the launch games sold at €74.99, Virtua Fighter being one.

jill_valentine

http://www.thejournal.ie/were-resolute-and-ready-to-fight-game-staff-hold-sit-ins-around-the-country-399255-Mar2012/

Around 110 staff at eleven stores are holding sit-in protests after the chain store announced that all of its branches in the Republic of Ireland are to close.
Staff were told of the closures by phone on Monday morning. Around 121 jobs are to be lost with the closure of the computer game chain.

Staff say they were given no notice period and that the company has told them it will not be paying redundancy. The company has told workers they will be able to claim minimum redundancy payments from the State.

"We want our redundancy payments to be looked after. We were told to claim payments from the State but we were given information on how to claim from the UK, not how to claim in Ireland."

Staff at the eleven stores have been told to pack up the stock but are refusing to do so until assurances have been given about payments.

“We’re not going to damage stock but we’re not going to clear the shops and send it back until our claims have been met,” said Walsh.

“Everyone is in good form at the moment. We’re pretty resolute and ready to fight,” she said.

PricewaterhouseCoopers has been appointed the administrators of the stores in Britain which are due to close but no firm has yet been appointed by Game to handle the Irish store closures.

Helix

VinLieger wrote: »

Looking longingly at games on shelves as i didnt have access to a credit card and couldnt afford the 70 euro games, yet people did buy them as that is what they cost. I now buy exclusively online and shop around for the best price plus shipping but saying people wont pay 80 quid for games is ridiculous IF that is the only price you are able to get them for

having spent the last half a decade (or decade for anyone with a credit card) spending no more than fifty quid a game, i assure you the likelihood of the general public accepting a 60% price hike is slim to none

again i point to the vita model, where sony has shown that they WILL offer games for less than retail price for digital downlaod

chrislad

Helix wrote: »

having spent the last half a decade (or decade for anyone with a credit card) spending no more than fifty quid a game, i assure you the likelihood of the general public accepting a 60% price hike is slim to none

again i point to the vita model, where sony has shown that they WILL offer games for less than retail price for digital downlaod

They need to bring that over to the PS3. 69.99 for new retail games? Madness!

Helix

chrislad wrote: »

They need to bring that over to the PS3. 69.99 for new retail games? Madness!

theyre 59.99 here, but you don't pay tax on them, so they work out about $4 cheaper than buying in store

Morag

Window of the GAME store in Blanchardstown shopping centre.

noodler

They got free Eddie Rockets?!!

I understand that store managers are meeting with PWC Ireland tomorrow, they still haven't got it in writing that they will be paid for March, notice etc. Best of luck guys and girls, the world is watching.

Richard Bruton is in China atm but GAME staff need to get onto his office and all local Govt. Ministers and TD's to see what they're doing about stopping this trend of UK originated Companies ignoring Irish Company Law about consultation and redundancy. We're looking at the tip of the iceberg in terms of this type of sharp practice if it's not challenged and nipped in the bud now.

It's an interesting conversation about online v bricks and mortar but it isn't relevant to the GAME situation. As Jill Valentine and others have stated repeatedly, the majority of Irish stores were profitable - even with poor support from the parent company.

For those of you who support the staff and are on facebook, please like and share this link: http://www.facebook.com/GameIrelandFight
Thanks

Procrastastudy

I am confused as to how anyone knows that the Irish stores were profitable. The stores wern't run on P&L (Profit and Loss) - any store mangaer that was given their P&L info would a) be very unlikely to pass it on (even now) b) couldn't confirm it anyway.

Procrastastudy

Helix wrote: »

having spent the last half a decade (or decade for anyone with a credit card) spending no more than fifty quid a game, i assure you the likelihood of the general public accepting a 60% price hike is slim to none

again i point to the vita model, where sony has shown that they WILL offer games for less than retail price for digital downlaod

You are completely missing the point. Competition regardless of where it comes from is what keeps prices down. As you remove the competition the prices will creep up. Steam is a great example. Its very much established itself as a monopoly and charges way more for new release games and keeps the prices higher longer than any bricks and motor ever did.

Once all the fixed stores are gone the online retailers will let their prices creep up. I'm not suggesting that people should buy from somewhere thats massively more expensive - just to keep an open mind as to what's going on in the big picture.

RobbingBandit

Well and truly Game over now,looking at the image from Blanchardstown they have striped the place,thanks to all the staff there for the years I have spent in the place picking up so many bargains. Hope you guys get what you deserve for the service you provided.

corcaigh07

Helix wrote: »

people wont pay 80 per game

they will if they have to, i remember my brother paying about 70 Punts on Street Fighter 2 for the Megadrive, plus of course some 6 button pads!