Goodnight, sweet prince.
This year's E3 was weird. Walmart had great deals, full stop; it'd be a much worse E3 without them. But then we had the weird thing where Amazon and Best Buy both had great deals, but they were mistakes. Then the actual deals, in addition to being disappointing by comparison (unavoidable though), were also kind of disappointing because Prime members already get the same deal year-round.
There were still obvious advantages over last year, though. If you don't have a Prime membership, 20% off is better than 0% off obviously. If you do have a Prime membership, you could replace your Prime orders in case you were worried about the discounts disappearing after your membership lapses (even though in practice that doesn't seem to be an issue). If you love Best Buy, 20% off immediately is better than 20x points at some point in the future, and only to be used against later purchases. And one thing we all kind of forgot: you didn't have to order multiple games at once to get the discount, something that used to be a key feature of E3 deals in the past.
All in all, I definitely ordered more this year than last year (and will likely keep more games than last year even after I cancel a bunch), and I tried to throw as much business as made sense to Walmart for originating the $50 deals. If they changed their ecommerce platform to allow you to cancel the same way Amazon does, it would've been a no-brainer. Best Buy got some orders from me because I don't like the idea of Amazon crushing its competition and wielding its monopoly powers for evil. On the other hand, Amazon got a lot of orders from me because it's just so damned easy to cancel things and I generally don't care too much about things arriving late, as they always do.
