The "I Hate Gamestop" Thread

[BikeJunkie]

Not to mention everyone becomes an antique or rarity expert because they saw an ebay auction at X dollar amount

Kinda like how everyone becomes a finance & accounting expert because they read a quarterly earnings report.

 

[Sulaco]

Not even just crushed.

Talking inserts removed and ripped or drown in soda, cases with broken corners or disc retention hubs, clear plastic insert sleeve looking like it was assaulted with a fork and a lighter, etc. Or the manual was used as a dinner plate.

Only used 360 games. PS3 and Wii U cases may be used but definitely not the abuse that any 360 game I want always suffers.

I only FINALLY found an acceptable condition Lost Odyssey. Trying to backfill my 360 library and I had 3 copies of Infinite Undiscovery in my hands and none of them acceptable condition.

I guess dude bros like this just don't take care of their stuff:

You do realize that just as many if not more 'so-called Dudebros' play games on the Playstation 3.
Just. As. Many., since the PS3 is and has been outselling the Xbox 360, and that's mainly the casual (*gasp!* Dudebro!*) market.

Second, I really doubt too many "dudebros" were really playing Lost Odyssey at the frat party in between Madden and Halo.

This platform elitism is beyond silly and childish.

 

[Tweak155]

You do realize that just as many if not more 'so-called Dudebros' play games on the Playstation 3.
Just. As. Many., since the PS3 is and has been outselling the Xbox 360, and that's mainly the casual (*gasp!* Dudebro!*) market.

Second, I really doubt too many "dudebros" were really playing Lost Odyssey at the frat party in between Madden and Halo.

This platform elitism is beyond silly and childish.

You don't know exdeath do you? It has nothing to do with the platform.

 

[exdeath]

You do realize that just as many if not more 'so-called Dudebros' play games on the Playstation 3.
Just. As. Many., since the PS3 is and has been outselling the Xbox 360, and that's mainly the casual (*gasp!* Dudebro!*) market.

Second, I really doubt too many "dudebros" were really playing Lost Odyssey at the frat party in between Madden and Halo.

This platform elitism is beyond silly and childish.

Difference is one company doesn't even hide the fact that they are aggressively catering specifically to the dudebro demographic... NFL integration? Come the fawk on!

 

[gothamhunter]

Difference is one company doesn't even hide the fact that they are aggressively catering specifically to the dudebro demographic... NFL integration? Come the fawk on!

Dude...do you even Madden bro?

 

[exdeath]

Being completely platform independent, I can say I heard the use of "mad tyte" and "dats dope" at the Xbox one launch far FAR more than PS4 launch.

 

[smackababy]

Difference is one company doesn't even hide the fact that they are aggressively catering specifically to the dudebro demographic... NFL integration? Come the fawk on!

You do realize the opening Thursday Night Football game drew over 25 million viewers right? But, of course, anything popular is "dudebro".

It must hurt to be such a sad, "I hate everything not made for Japanese preteens" individual.

 

[exdeath]

You do realize the opening Thursday Night Football game drew over 25 million viewers right? But, of course, anything popular is "dudebro".

It must hurt to be such a sad, "I hate everything not made for Japanese preteens" individual.

That's nice.

Then there are the other 275 million of us that don't get drunk and act like retards when there is a football game...

 

[Doppel]

How can they move away from this when you can't sell the digital copy and it costs the same and you cannot get the collectors edition packaging?

It's nothing like music. You don't pick and choose content from the disk to download like individual songs. You get the whole game and it's the whole retail price of $60 to boot. It's also not like movies where it was instant and cheaper. You have to download 50GB of data then install it. That's not instant at all.

It's not my opinion that it will move away from this. It IS moving away from this. Collector's edition packaging is irrelevant to 99% of people (that number is probably not even hyperbole). Steam users sure don't seem to care.

Consoles will go the way of PC games. They already are; increasingly people are buying digitally.

Most of the argument I'm seeing here (if not all of them) for why digital doesn't work and can't have already been dispelled by Steam, which is doing it.

the whole "hate on gamestop" thing is the whole "hate on anything popular" thing that most of the internet is up in arms about. just like everyone hates on apple, microsoft, any kind of popular movies and music, etc.

Absolutely not. In fact, the loving on gamestop is hating on popular; I'm using the increasing popularity of digital media as the cornerstone of why gamestop's future is death. But again I don't hate gamestop, I simply know their future is dire.

Games stopped including paper manuals recently.

Yet more reason moving to digital won't be hard. I remember the ancient art of war at sea, it was a 286 game. The manual was a beautiful TEXTBOOK. Time changes, they have gotten thinner and crappier. Now the closest thing we have is gaming guides for $25. And as you said many games don't even bother now. I don't blame them; I never read them.

 

[cmdrdredd]

It's not my opinion that it will move away from this. It IS moving away from this. Collector's edition packaging is irrelevant to 99% of people (that number is probably not even hyperbole). Steam users sure don't seem to care.

Consoles will go the way of PC games. They already are; increasingly people are buying digitally.

Most of the argument I'm seeing here (if not all of them) for why digital doesn't work and can't have already been dispelled by Steam, which is doing it.Absolutely not. In fact, the loving on gamestop is hating on popular; I'm using the increasing popularity of digital media as the cornerstone of why gamestop's future is death. But again I don't hate gamestop, I simply know their future is dire.Yet more reason moving to digital won't be hard. I remember the ancient art of war at sea, it was a 286 game. The manual was a beautiful TEXTBOOK. Time changes, they have gotten thinner and crappier. Now the closest thing we have is gaming guides for $25. And as you said many games don't even bother now. I don't blame them; I never read them.

Steam worked because the alternative was to have every game install some crap that counts how many times you install and on what hardware, then lock you out of your own game. No console game uses anything close to this. There is no garbage DRM pushed on your PlayStation. Then everyone said "hey you can buy a whole pack of 5 games for $30." and again consoles don't have this. You also have 4 DVDs to install for one game on pc. Not so on console. Pc games are pirated more heavily as well.

There are more differences than similarities really.

Further GTA5 is the fastest selling game of all time and most of them were on disk waiting in line to get it first. The digital copy even had problems and wouldn't load textures right. That kind of nonsense drives people away from digital, not toward.

 

[smackababy]

Steam worked because the alternative was to have every game install some crap that counts how many times you install and on what hardware, then lock you out of your own game. No console game uses anything close to this. There is no garbage DRM pushed on your PlayStation. Then everyone said "hey you can buy a whole pack of 5 games for $30." and again consoles don't have this. You also have 4 DVDs to install for one game on pc. Not so on console. Pc games are pirated more heavily as well.

There are more differences than similarities really.

Further GTA5 is the fastest selling game of all time and most of them were on disk waiting in line to get it first. The digital copy even had problems and wouldn't load textures right. That kind of nonsense drives people away from digital, not toward.

There were not Steam sales until around 2010 (that is the first Steam Holiday sale I can find reference to and I don't remember any big Steam sales before then). I've been using Steam since HL2 came out and required it. Everyone was up in arms about how awful the platform was and how awful the DRM was (such as with the Xbox One's announcement). Valve went ahead anyway and it turned out to be great years later.

 

[cmdrdredd]

There were not Steam sales until around 2010 (that is the first Steam Holiday sale I can find reference to and I don't remember any big Steam sales before then). I've been using Steam since HL2 came out and required it. Everyone was up in arms about how awful the platform was and how awful the DRM was (such as with the Xbox One's announcement). Valve went ahead anyway and it turned out to be great years later.

Not every steam game includes the DRM. It can be used simply as a download and purchase tool by the developer. There are some inconveniences with pc game disks (4 disks to install) and also some architectural differences. On a pc you typically have more HDD space than any console and can easily add more or backup and move your installs. External HDD support for the ps4 and xb1 can't come soon enough to help with that.

 

[BikeJunkie]

Steam worked because the alternative was to have every game install some crap that counts how many times you install and on what hardware

On what basis have you drawn this conclusion?

 

[smackababy]

On what basis have you drawn this conclusion?

Before Steam the DRM was getting pretty bad on PC. Some of it screwed up your install, some wouldn't work simply because you had a certain CD drive (with a CD burner), and some of just didn't work.


And for people bitching about manuals, GameStop isn't the ones removing them. It is the publishers / developers. And for quite a lot of games, they are unneccessary. What is the point of a manual for Madden of SF4? I mean, really? All of the controls and tutorials that would have been only available in print form have been incorporated into the game.


I do miss the days of getting a huge book detailing a good majority of the games (thanks Richard Garriott, for that novel that came with Ulitma Online, which incorrectly labeled the katana as a fencing weapon). But, all that information is now easily available on their website; which is even more convenient. I can actually search online, I don't have to read the entire book for some specific knowledge I was looking for.

 

[BikeJunkie]

Before Steam the DRM was getting pretty bad on PC. Some of it screwed up your install, some wouldn't work simply because you had a certain CD drive (with a CD burner), and some of just didn't work.

You've established correlation, but I'm looking for evidence of causation. One can hypothesize that this was a contributing factor into people's acceptance of Steam, but the nature of cmdrdredd's statement implied not only a degree of certainty, but a casual dismissal of any explanation that would lend credence to the notion that what applied to the Steam transition could also apply to consoles. Shocking.

Given that the PC user base got dragged into Steam kicking and screaming in the beginning (in other words, it was anything but willful), I think his assertion is faulty, to put it gently. The only other argument he's accepted is that people embraced Steam for its discounts. But again, he fails to recognize that 1) the Steam transition was already in full swing before it was "embraced", and 2) these discounts didn't commence until later in its existence. The takeaway being that people can get dragged into a new medium almost entirely against their will... and I see much less resistance to digital distribution on consoles than I did on PC. MUCH less.

So, getting back to my original question, I'm assuming he has evidence - a source of some sort - that establishes at least the starting basis for a foundation that people accepted Steam to avoid DRM. We'll pretend - for the time being - that the same DRM that people were allegedly running from wasn't also distributed on Steam 😉

 

[sweenish]

There is no garbage DRM pushed on your PlayStation.

You're funny.

 

[artemicion]

Not "defending" Gamestop, but the reason why service and prices at Gamestop is so crappy is because the retailer profit margins on video games is razor thin. I read awhile back in Forbes that new $60 games are generally $48 wholesale. Meaning $12 per new game, which you'd have to further subtract operating costs, employee wages, overstock, etc. before you get to profit.

So yeah, if I'm running a store than only sells games at $12 over wholesale, I'm probably going to employ a bunch of minimum wage slackjaws. I'm also probably going to try to sell you $25 HDMI cables and I'm going to offer to buy your used games for $20 and turn around and sell them for $45.

 

[BikeJunkie]

Ruh Roh Raggy:

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/01/14/gamestop-im-not-impressed.aspx

GameStop shares opened 15% lower today after it announced disappointing results for the critical holiday shopping season ... New software sales plunged by 22.5%. This was worse than GameStop projected, but any gamer could've seen this coming.

Any unbiased gamer, that is. Anywho...

This is the worst possible scenario for GameStop investors, because hardware is a low-margin category. ... The end result of better-than-expected hardware sales and weaker-than-expected software sales is that the bottom line is going to take a hit. GameStop now sees a profit of $1.85 to $1.95 a share for the quarter, well short of the $1.97-to-$2.14-a-share range that it was forecasting less than two months ago.

Told ya.

 

[smackababy]

Ruh Roh Raggy:

http://www.fool.com/investing/general/2014/01/14/gamestop-im-not-impressed.aspx



Any unbiased gamer, that is. Anywho...



Told ya.

Of course software sales are poor. There just aren't that many games for the new consoles. They sold how many consoles? More than 8 million next gen combined? (I think last a read PS4 was like 4.1 and Xbox One was a bit behind with like 3.5 or something, but that was a while ago). So, even with 8 million consoles, how many people purchased new games?

The highest selling Xbox One title was COD Ghosts with 1.28 million and the PS4 is the same game with 1.65 million. The hardware to software ratio is just over 2 for both consoles. For the previous gen (360 and PS3) it is around 10.

I don't think it is all doom and gloom for Gamestop just yet.

 

[BikeJunkie]

Of course software sales are poor. There just aren't that many games for the new consoles. They sold how many consoles? More than 8 million next gen combined? (I think last a read PS4 was like 4.1 and Xbox One was a bit behind with like 3.5 or something, but that was a while ago). So, even with 8 million consoles, how many people purchased new games?

The highest selling Xbox One title was COD Ghosts with 1.28 million and the PS4 is the same game with 1.65 million. The hardware to software ratio is just over 2 for both consoles. For the previous gen (360 and PS3) it is around 10.

I don't think it is all doom and gloom for Gamestop just yet.

Head in the sand.

 

[mizzou]

I've always liked selling my games back to amazon or gamestop because I know I won't get that call a week later, "Hey man...uh...your game is broken...I need my money back."

I could have made 50% more if I sold them on ebay or whatever(to sell them quickly), but I really am more concerned at cleaning out drawer space then maximizing profits.

They are like the goodwill of video games.

My wife and I also buy a lot of used games there as well. I know every time I buy a game, it will work or I get a no-hassle return.

We don't necessarily buy a lot of games, so it's not that big of a deal $ wise.

Gamestop is convenience....what I see as a useful and reliable third party between you and the publisher.

If Gamestop goes the way of the dodo bird....I won't lose any sleep.

I wonder though what their plans are for the future...other then selling used games...I don't see how they are attractive to be bought out.

Maybe they could partner with Redbox and offer a better video game catalog?? :\


Now the NAME gamestop still has value, but only on a digital space. Maybe they could turn it into an IGN or something like that.


...perhaps they could figure out a way to take digital downloads...put them on a playable disc (for those without internet or data caps) and then provide that as a service charge for like $3.00 or $2.00 or something?

They could also serve as a physical storage warehouse? I don't know...

 

[Doppel]

Rumor on ign today about a discless xb1 in nov. even if not true it is fairly believable a rumor. It would kill used games and not by for in the matter with invalidating discs as tried before but getting people to willingly buy a discless system. Sell it for $50 less, people will buy it.

This kind of thing would hurt GameStop. The funny thing is a blu ray drive is pretty darn cheap so it is fairly transparent why ms would take this approach. Thing is no drive also takes away from the capabilities of being a media hub.

 

[cmdrdredd]

No drive means no blu-ray player. Center of your entertainment it is not.

 

[purbeast0]

Rumor on ign today about a discless xb1 in nov. even if not true it is fairly believable a rumor. It would kill used games and not by for in the matter with invalidating discs as tried before but getting people to willingly buy a discless system. Sell it for $50 less, people will buy it.

This kind of thing would hurt GameStop. The funny thing is a blu ray drive is pretty darn cheap so it is fairly transparent why ms would take this approach. Thing is no drive also takes away from the capabilities of being a media hub.

yup, already posted in the official xbox one thread 😛

 

[OptimumSlinky]

No console game uses anything close to this. There is no garbage DRM pushed on your PlayStation.

Online Pass, anyone?

The DRM on consoles is there; it's simply more sophisticated. Now it's tied to your gamer tag vs your actual hardware. Digital vs physical. Digital will win.