MS kills off Gamestop

>MS kills off Gamestop

Huh.

I seriously doubt that Microsoft would do something this good to the videogame industry.

They've been trying to get rid of gamestop since they made it clear that they want to push digital sales and gamestop got all pissy and threatened to not carry the xbone

Nice

Gamestops days were numbered the moment digital purchases became a thing.

A netflix-type service for games is just the death-knell. It's not Gamestop either. Game fly and any other service that relies on physical copies is fucked.

Digital sales cut out the middleman entirely.

Gamefly could introduce a digital service, but it wouldn't compare to this at all.

I still only buy physical copies but I just order from amazon.

And Gamestop will do it with Scorpio.

And all Xbox games.

>gamestops in both cities I've lived in (more than a 100k in each) closed down.
Gamestop is dead outside of America

(more than a 100k living in each)
fixed

>Gamestops days were numbered the moment digital purchases became a thing.

Not really. They could have been a quality used games dealer and done worthwhile physical tie ins to current games but instead they chose to be mega jews who destroy extra stock before throwing it in the dumpster and berate people into buying store credit cards and other garbage.

>They could have been a quality used games dealer and done worthwhile physical tie ins to current games but instead they chose to be mega jews who destroy extra stock before throwing it in the dumpster
Holy shit this. What in the actual fuck were they thinking?

Yeah no shit, I hope it dies. Fuck their shit

If you want physical copies just order from online retailers or go to Target/Best Buy/Wal Mart

whats a gamestop?

They better team up with Sony or Nintendo soon for that to work
I love this idea of a digital subscription service and have been touting the idea for years

Back in 2011 just 5 months after buying a 3ds the thing died. I had no choice than to send it into Nintendo where they gave me a replacement. Unfortunately I had a dozen or so ds I/e shop games on it. When I got it back they were all gone. I contacted them and they just said "I'd have to buy them again" that's why I'll never buy all digital games.

Same. I'll buy physical as long as I can.
When the day digital is the only way to acquire games comes, I'll just go full /vr/

Already though, Gamefly is like $16/month for 1 game or $20/month for 2 games.
They'd have to seriously undercut their business model to be competitive, and Sony was quick to turn EA Access (A $5/month sub) away.

It's not the same for vidya. Streaming services leverage huge media houses who already have ownership stakes in huge libraries of content which they pay a flat fee for a whole bunch of stuff. There are only a few orgs in gaming who have comparable ownership claims and they make more money by doing their own thing with their catalogs.

This, in Ireland Amazon crushes all competition for physical games, you're saving about 25 euros by using Amazon.
PSN and Steam are good for sales though.

Gamestop is ran by inept idiots.

They had a chance to compete with Steam in it's infancy but they were too pre-occupied with skewering dumb kids to trade in their games for puny centavos.

Gamestop deserves to tank, hard.

There is literally nothing wrong with GameStop

>Charges more for a used game they got for $5 than a new game

Nope, nothing wrong here

Good. Gamestop sucks.

They over-saturated themselves.
There's 4000+ Gamestops in America alone. One in every mall. There's no way they could transform into a niche physical dealer without drastically changes including shutting down a shit ton of stores.

>I love this idea of a digital subscription service
Thanks for killing videogames nigger

I've heard from an employee that since they bought out thinkgeek they've been plummeting since no one buys shitty gaming merchandise

Thinkgeek is cheap chinese shit with trendy branding and marketing. Almost every single product they sell is low quality garbage.

Oh boy. This means less memory on consoles so they make sure you fill it all up and have to buy extra space.

Good riddance.

Well GameStation in the UK is long dead, Game are clutching at straws by catering to the VR bubble, toys and accessories. Funny the only company doing well is CeX who cater in preowns

Ive noticed lately theyve marked all of their geek merchandise to clearance with bright signs, yet still they remain on shelves.

In this day and age I think they may be the only one that can.

I've seen many people march to the Sony's beat with little to nothing to offer. And just look at Nintendo. I mean the PC mustard face fags make the PC very unappealing.

So whats left, Microsoft just one day pulls out their dick and just shake up the system.

>mfw gamestop sells cheap af steam keys
>fucking fallout 4 for $19

This.

They got greedy and dug their grave. Let'em die.

maybe now people will sell their games and get money for them now on ebay or something.

Also this. I'm in the US and I get 20% off every new game. Its starting to become a problem, I gotta finish up RE7 and Nioh to make way for Nier

>GameStompped

What the fuck? I love Microsoft now

I worked as a manager for 3 years. Ask me anything I suppose. I regularly broke every single rule they had there. (Even posted pics of my mgs5 playthrough weeks before it came out)

>this good
Are you fucking retarded? You think games being treated as subscription services is good for the consumer in any way? This is literally PS Now except with Xbox games.

Why are the female employees non-gamers?

It sure didn't work out for netflix

or hulu

or amazon

or crunchyroll

or hbo

or gamefly

or

or

or

Buying digital games isn't bad when it's tied to an account, where if you do lose your games, you can just sign in to your account and re download them all

Are you claiming ANY of those services are good for the consumer?

Because they hire women based on looks. A pretty girl with 0 interest in video games will always be able to sell better than a pretty girl that does know games. My store was overwhelmingly female and the good looking ones didn't know shit and made a fuck ton of money, the decent looking ones that knew a bunch had 0 selling ability.

There's a difference between a video streaming service to a game streaming service user.
There's a reason why Sony's hasn't taken off.

>Brick and Mortar stores are dead/dying in the age of infomation and online shopping
HMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMMM really makes me thunk!

>Literally PS Now but with Xbox games
Except
>Half the price of PS Now
>Download games instead of streaming
>Can play the games offline for the full subscription period
>20% discount on the games and their DLC through the service
>Not needed to play 7th gen games you already own

uh yes? As a consumer i'm able to pay 10 a month for a streaming service with an unlimited amount of uses? What are you trying to prove here, why am I wrong, just say it already.

The evolution of consoles has been shittier PC's morphing into slightly less shittier PC's.

Things like storage space are issues you should have seen coming years ago.

It didn't take off because it's streaming based and it doesn't do ps4 games.

So when will Sup Forums stop pretending to be /biz/ and act like stocks matter to us?

Highlights? Most memorable thing you did / happen?

Luckily physical retailers are thriving in Australia, as our internet is so incredibly fucking slow.

I'm shocked they've managed to make it this far. Their business ethics are shit. You get fired if you don't sell enough useless addons and warranties every single week. Can't be good for morale.

So what you're suggesting is a digital download service that will most likely max out the harddrive of the system because of the bloated size of AAA games nowadays.
I don't think you've thought about this properly.

>This is literally PS Now except with Xbox games.

Wasn't PS now that horrid system where you had to buy every game individually?

Let me ask you, how are they bad?

Honestly you sound extremely butthurt.

They're gonna get the Blockbuster treatment sooner or later.

why hasnt gamestop just implemented their power up rewards system into online subscriptions like this? Theyd make bank

I really miss my customer base. I had people that would come in just to shoot the shit for hours. My crew was incredibly hardworking and we never had a bad day inner personally, the shitty days came when we were being punished for not meeting the impossible sales goals.

One of my favorite memories was from around fallout 4. We were given special lanyards for the managers and a customer who spoke very broken english came in once and saw my assistant manager wearing one. He asked her repeatedly for it and she kept saying no until this guy literally blurted out "THIS IS WHY GIRLS SHOULDN'T PLAY GAMES."

He ran out the door, and I shit you not, came back six hours later with chocolate and flowers, asking her if he could apologize. She took the flowers and threw them in the trash and told him to fuck off. We ate the chocolate haha.

He tried to come back into the store with a disguise once.

most americans don't have access to google fiber. this means the data cap is the constraining factor when you rent games digitally.

I live somewhere that has bandwidth to download horizon in 30 minutes, and I have a ps4 pro.

So yeah that would be awesome. I'm probably only going to have 2-4 games from a service like this installed anyway. It's a convenience thing, which these days I'll always pay for.

Jesus they are the worst, I used to work walmart management and they were the golden example of areas they wanted to take over.

You would be surprised how many times they tried to implement a used game system.

This.

Comcast is our overlords.

Comcast datacap is set to a terabyte right now, I live in a house that streams, buys all games digital, and does amateur video production. Even in our worst months we never hit the cap.

I'm not trying to justify it, I'm just saying that it really isn't that bad.

Good thing I have a 2TB Xbone

Did they really push on quota's and warranties sales?

>I live somewhere that has bandwidth to download horizon in 30 minutes, and I have a ps4 pro.
Okay, that supports the streaming service but how does that affect the whole hard drive issue?

> I'm probably only going to have 2-4 games from a service like this installed anyway.
And for the people who want more than 2-4 games? Especially since 5 and higher seems to be the point where people value something as worth while.

Again, I don't think you've thought about this properly.

Bullshit, I live in a house of gamers and we hit that a week and a half in and they wanted to charge 250 bucks over our fucking bill.

So what are the games? When i looked at it last I saw no list, just an image saying it's happening.

100's of games tho, there's bound to be at least 5 you wanna try out

yeah they pushed that shit HARD. When we didn't make goal we would be either told our hours would be cut or they would just straight up cut our hours.

Basically you've got your new product sales, your preowned sales, your preorders, and your warranties.

My district would say "alright guys, we need 30 percent used sales today, and make sure that we hit that 20 percent for the warranties. I guess I'm forgetting that we needed to be selling the powerup card too. They might put the per transaction percentage they want of that in the high 30s low 40s any day.

We were a low volume store too. We made decent money, but being in the middle of the ghetto youd have dudes that would come in with 5 dollars and that was IT.

So basically somewhere between 20 and 30 percent of your customers for the day (which might only be 40 customers) need to be a used game sale, a warranty on the game, a NEW powerup card signup, and a preorder. Any time you didn't have a customer that did all of those it was basically a wasted sale.

The service is currently in Alpha and won't be available to everyone until spring.
We probably won't see the full list until then.
A few games will cycle out every month and new one's will come in.

Try reading that again

When you're done with a game you delete it, and you learn the importance of your space limitations and income as far as playing video games goes. If you want more, you pay more, pure and simple. It's a video game streaming service, you work with the limitations or you don't spend the money.

But it's cool, keep telling me this is stupid and wont work, you'll be paying in on some game streaming service within the next 2-3 years.

I live somewhere with no datacap but a ridiculously slow speed. Bless idiocy I guess. The issue I have is that while my Bone only has the basic 500 gigs I formatted a 4 TB external a while back and have another one I got just recently for a heap price. So while I have storage for days with my speed i'd need around a day, maybe two to play any game that doesn't let you play while downloading. Don't even get me started on Halo 5 and its nearly 100 gig fucking filesize.

I'll never understand why people like to get fucked in the ass by big corporations

I don't know how Gamestop is in the US but in Germany there is no reason to buy anything at Gamestop at all.
Both new and used games are overpriced, they don't really have any special deals that would make them stand out, they don't even have consoles set up where kids can play when they skip school.

this, but we didn't get a charge, just a warning
its supposed to be "unlimited" because its a home service
and yet
>letter with monthly statement: hey did you know you use more data than 90% of customers on the same plan?
WELL SORRY FOR BEING SUCH A BAD GOY

Comcast will throttle your speed regardless of your data usage.

Don't use the service if you don't want it/ harddrive can't take it.
Personally I have unlimited internet and a 2TB console, downloading a fuck ton of games isn't a problem for me.
This service is incredibly useful to me.

It's just me and my roommate, but even when there were 4 of us we didn't break the cap.

None of us pirate anything though, which is what I automatically assume when anyone breaks the cap.

Used to work with the company, still have friends that do.

Thinkgeek is profitable for the company. Very profitable.

The loss moreso comes from them making the customer experience substantially worse in order to chase the profits they had in their peak, which was a boom period they will not get again in this market. We could tell execs that ALL DAY and they just looked at us like we were crazy.

The company laid off us and everyone else that was trying to push for better customer experience focus.

The only beneficial thing they've done recently for that is increased trade in values.

MSbest. Fuck gamestop buying up babbages

digital is the future anyway

Well fuck. I just want to know if its mostly Games With Gold titles or if we'll see actual fucking games worth getting excited for. I mean its cool if you bundle it with 3 months of gold for some low price bullshit initially for new customers. That doesn't really make active owners excited, however.

The worst thing was when the stuff started rolling in the stores and you'd have armchair businessmen telling you that selling all those toys was gonna sink the company, meanwhile the only things being sold are fnaf pencil toppers and fucking funcopops.

Yes, lets all celebrate turning gaming into a rental service the consumer only has one option in. That's totally not going to bite you in the ass.

its not like they have a choice user
monopolies can afford to block competitors out by lobbying law makers to legally protect their continued monopoly
this is why you need to have strict enforced anti-monopoly laws

>Don't use the service if you don't want it
Woah, truly an enlightened insight like no other that has come before it

You know what, I'm okay with that open. The more middle men cut out of this industry and the more bloat trimmed the better. If we can just completely kill off gaming journalism and review sites now it'd been even better cause they're completely obsolete. Hype alone and demos help sell games just fine and these journalists are disgustingly self-serving, contributed the most to the politicization that has killed the gaming community this generation and possibly give the least shit about video games of any party. If they could write about something else to make a living and get attention I'm sure it wouldn't matter to them either way.

Only thing I can see happening is a good portion of Gamestops shutting down while the remaining are converted into Thinkgeek stores.

So you mean how it was when Blockbuster was a thing and EB Games was even less known than Gamestop is now? I can deal with that.

Looks like they'll have stuff that they haven't given away yet. The service will probably be less useful for long time XBL members.
I've wanted to try out Halo 5 tho, so I don't mind paying $10 just for a month of that.

Shit sucks man, I can only speak for myself but I know what I want when I buy a game. Its not really a market of impulse buys

It was okay when Steam did it. I lament not seeing physical copies of PC games now more than ever, especially since the last one I bought was just a STEAM KEY IN A FUCKING BOX.

Don't get me wrong, gamestop corporate is out of touch and stupid, but the armchair businessmen you talk about are the worst.

The things I've seen them demand of gamestop that are logistically impossible are astounding.

Hell not even digital distribution, Amazon gives better deals and service than Gamestop ever has and they don't harass the shit out of you while you're trying to shop either because it's non-retail and just you, your search queries and maybe a guy asking you to sign for a package at the door.

That's not what I'm getting at. It's the fact they justify it and even ask for more that I find hard to understand

>Industry laughs as Blockbuster gets fucked down to dust by Netflix
>Just sit there and watches it happened to videos, thinking they're safe with their video games
>Years to do something about it, doesn't.

Yeah I feel awful, it was just a tragedy that people don't like to go get harassed for in store credits anymore.