Buying Gamestation might have been their biggest mistake. It made them over expand too quickly and they probably overpaid for the company as it was at the industries peak.
I have a feeling the death will be protracted like Chips was (employees were dreading what would be derived on a games launch game as it usually wasn't games but rather junk like Star Wars Episode 1 action figures).
I'll do that annoying thing where I quote posts from 10 hours ago...
I wonder if this is why they only had 2 copies of RE: Revelations per store, and didn't even stock it online.
Apparently the whole high street was like that. Might be something to do with TheHut (Zaaavvii) having the bundle SKU exclusive for far cheaper...
Also, now they can't blackmail publishers into not selling their PC titles via Steam.
Karma's a bitch.
Only took 40 posts. Was there any evidence of this as my fuzzy memory recalls it being,
"hmm only affects UK therefore GAME are responsible because I don't like them".
The question is HOW MANY will they stock? 2 per store like Revelations?
Vitas? Sony will be desperate to get rid of them and have a good launch.
I'm thinking a lot of the reason many towns still have 2 GAMEs is that they may be on long leases that they can't get out of and with current trading conditions they just can't sell the shops to other retailers (why take on the lease of an occupied GAME shop when there are 2 tonnes of empty shops elsewhere)
They've said this before. They are trying to downsize to about 500 stores (from 600+) though. Too little too late comes to mind.
Just looking on their website and I didn't realise it was this bad...
http://www.game.co.uk/en/games/?att...ttributeValue1=63&attributeName2=Release Date
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Yes, that's right, GAME - supposedly the biggest games retailer in the country - currently has 21 new Xbox 360 games in stock.
21. That's pathetic.
I would love to hear from someone who works in their warehouse.
The warehouse is a whole lot smaller though. But yes this nails GAMEs real problem...I'll get to this later.
CEX are doing quite well at the moment I think, they've just expanded in a town near me. I wonder if they'd ever branch into new games?
They did new games and imports in the 90s. Publishers gave them trouble for it in the early 2000s and they responded by giving up both.
They need to get south of Leicester-ish soon... but then rapid expansion might be really unwise for them. Although they could easily eat up the market if we do lose Game.
Heck, I wonder how they're doing, financially? Could they buy up a chunk of Game to get an identity in the south?
Grainger games? Apparently their tactic is cheap rents that have free leases for a while and expand then worry later. Reality might stike them soon too...what stops their southern expansion is rents being too high and also their distribution hub.
Great, this is just the kind of news I wanted to read as soon as I get back from work :/
There certainly isn't much word of this in the stores, the staff have all known about the low stock situation but most of us just assumed the company was hanging on until the new financial year to purchase new stock. Honestly I don't know how this "disappointing" Christmas has come about, our store had queues out the door almost all Christmas and sales were better than ever before.
Now I'll go into the real problem.
It is clear they've had cashflow problems for about a year now. How they've responded to this is to deep discount games a few months after released as an adrenaline filled cattle prod (even on some Nintendo published games which have insane wholesale costs). This leads to a void of new stock of those particular titles which is why we see the online screenshot above of having a whole 20 Xbox360 games available to buy as new. No back catalogue. Now a specific example to show how this is digging to get out of a hole.
Xenoblade Chronicles. Overbought copies after launch sell-out (title lost momentum after that but it being a good JRPG has a long tail interest). Let's say they paid £25 per unit wholesale. Over Christmas they sold these for £10 thus losing £15 each sale...but they've got £10 cash now rather than £30 at an unspecificed date in the future (I've read a few whispers of "I wanted Xenoblade but GAME have no copies" in the past week).
Of course GAME stores are only a finite size but it having no back catalogue (rather than random trade ins) seems short sighted and they've been doing it for years.