HotFezz8 said:
could sainsburys single handledly kill the games shops?
To put it bluntly, no.
Now for the explainy bit.
As far as Activision are concerned they most likely don't care, Sainsburys and all the other supermarkets will have bought the games from Activision at whatever price Activision was charging for trade sales. Activision have their money and what happens next is of minimal concern to them.
As for why they do it, it's partly because they can afford to. The Supermarkets have bought these games by the million and probably negotiated a good price with Activision based on that they would be the largest orders in the country (they will have orderd a LOT more copies than any of the game chain stores).
The main reason though is that they are not actually interested in selling MW2 (or any other blockbuster game, film or album) for much or any profit at all. What they want is to get you into their store, where they can sell you other things at a proper mark up. Think about it, most people going in to buy MW2 will buy it, then get some milk, or bottles of drink, or whatever else they realise they need to buy whilst they are there.
All these little extra sales from people they got into stores to buy MW2 will amount to an ernomous amount of money. Certainly more than the profit from selling MW2 at full price (with correspondingly lower sales and people through door numbers).
The big game shops and HMV will probably do this too, if they get you in with £50 for MW2 they can sell you MW2 cut price and CD's or whatever at full mark up. I expect there'll be at least one buy MW2 and get MW1 half price deal as well, there's going to be masses of people without the first buying the second.
As for damaging game stores, they've already been doing it for years and to an extent it has. There are much fewer independant game shops even than five years ago. There's two here (Loughborough), but besides Liverpool and London that's the most I've ever encountered in one town. None is the normal number now. Like with Butchers it'll probably kill of the weaker stores leaving only chains and the good specialists, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.
Gamers will keep buying from game stores, because they don't just buy the blockbusters, so to some extent or other specialist stores are going to survive.
Personally I think it's a win for consumers, it effectively kurb stomps Activision's and other publishers masive price fixing. In main stores it's probable MW2 will never sell for it's intended rrp, which can only be a good thing.