Yes, this is true. If Nintendo/Microsoft/Sony pays for the space, you've got to advertise them, which means giving them the majority of the room. It's a big yay for fairness.
Treblaine said:
Summary
Games retail needs:
-economy of scale (cut out middle men, distribution costs, get special deals)
-higher sales
ersonnel ratio
Internet shopping FTW!
Also fanciful idea of 2nd hand games stores.
Yay! We're debating lol
Some good points there. To the counter argument!
You're quite right, a lot of the reason why games are so expensive is to do with the way they're distributed, especially when you're dealing with a chain that has a lot of smaller stores. However, sometimes there isn't a way around that. Whilst places like HMV can offer games at lower prices, that comes with the downside that a lot of places don't have a HMV.
My example of this is my hometown, a small seaside resort. Over the years they've tried putting Tower records here, Virgin, HMV, all sorts of larger media stores, but they never stick, leaving our town without any larger shops stocking purely DVDs and music. Instead, all we have are two independents, four supermarkets and a stupidly overpriced WH Smiths. Some people do like to shop in a physical store, and without a Game around they wouldn't be able to do that, and most likely the revenue from those sales would be lost, due to their reluctance to, for various reasons, use the internet. To summarise, yes HMV might get it cheaper due to their buying power, but smaller towns and villages can't always rely on shops they don't have.
As for your point about personnel being the greatest drain on company resources, you do again have a point. However where this falls flat is that most Game stores, certainly in my region, are already being run on skeleton crews. Seriously, there is literally no way that my shop could function with less staff then we've got.
The reason we bug customers when we're perilously close to not being able to function as a shop is because we're told to. If you don't hit a certain customer conversion rate, there consequences. If you don't hit all your targets, there's consequences, if you don't sell enough warranties, there's serious consequences. None of the aforementioned consequences are good. Also, we're a business. We need to make money. The reason we want that mother to buy a Wii for her kids is that 1) they might actually enjoy it, because Wii's are kinda fun, but more importantly 2) we need the money. The thread is called 'Huge Closures for GAME'. It's not like we're not sweating the sales here.
You say 'good riddance to the high street game store', mentioning that prices will get better for customers when they go. I think this is an immensely flawed thought. High Street retails may not be the cheapest, but without a high street chain of 'specialist game stores' (or not so specialist if you've had a bad experience) there would be a lack of competition for supermarkets, aka a physical monopoly, which you've said you're against. I said in my first point that many people in my hometown don't like to buy off the internet, seeing it as untrustworthy or having had a bad experience, or even just because they like having someone to talk to when they come in to shop. For people like them, it would be a disastrous move, as
without any reason to price games cheaper than a specialist, the supermarkets would increase the prices, having no need to stay competitive.
Also, with supermarkets being the only option for people buying games, most of the choice would be gone, as they don't stock preowned and only really push the latest titles. There would be a lot of disgruntled former gamers wandering around.
Now, interestingly enough, your idea for fully pre-owned stocked shops has already been trialed by GAME in several locations, and over those trials has been found not to be a viable business model. Those shops simply couldn't draw in customers without having the big new titles to push. You say they don't go well together, the sale of new and pre-owned, but that's the only way they can go together. Either of them on their own simply doesn't cut it. New doesn't offer enough profit and pre-owned can't get in the people.
As someone who's worked in a game shop for a number of years now, and become sufficiently jaded, your idea of the perfect game shop is incredibly idealistic, and completely inviable. You don't seem to recognize that the some people working in GAME stores, such as myself, do so because they love games, however the environment of work is not the place to amass gaming experience, funnily enough. We're not paid to play games, we're paid to process them, price them and sell them.
To get the amount of gaming knowledge you suggest would be appreciated by a customer, the clerk would have to spend every hour not working playing games, because there are so many games out there that to have knowledge of even a tiny proportion of them would require a serious lack of social life. Also, you'd be appealing to a very select cliental, who are in my personal experience, broke most of the time, making profits a distant dream.
The difference between a game sales assistant and Quentin Tarantino is that games are interactive and so require more attention (meaning playing on the job is out of the question), and take many hours to complete. Even a short game at 6 hours is three times longer than most movies, let alone say the 50 hour latest Final Fantasy.
I think Ebay is probably the closest you're going to get to your bargain bins of wonderment, because in a physical shop as you suggest, it wouldn't work without other things to draw the customer in. My local independent game store sells new games to bolster sales, as well as airsofting equipment on the side, swords, knives and various deadly weaponry. As funky as the shop is, they don't know much actually about games themselves though.
