“Is there anything you want to pre-order?” Almost nobody goes in and out of a GameStop without hearing those words. Employees are measured by how many pre-orders they can collect, while GameStop collects the money months before a game’s actual release. But recently, a systems overhaul has sabotaged the strategy, with copies arriving late or not at all, and some employees fear they will be the ones to pay the price.
For the past few days, the GameStop subreddit has been inundated with Current staff complaining about computer problems, starting from borked inventory searches Pre-order histories that were completely wiped out before stores received their shipments. “How can I push pre-orders when we can’t get crap in?” read a contribution. “Customers are understandably upset and our regular customers now only order offline because we can’t fulfill the niche stuff…”
Three GameStop employees my box spoke to repeated similar problems. They trace the problem back to a SAP software conversion
“The inventories in our systems are currently unreliable,” wrote one employee in an email. “We get shipments from the warehouse that don’t even show up on our receipt lists, so they let us open the boxes, take inventory and email it back to inventory control. It took me most of my day today to process just four boxes this way.”
Which games are the victims of this current pre-order crisis? NBA 2K23one of the biggest sports games of the year is one. JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R is another. But some of the hardest hit games are niche titles like Made in Abyss: Falling Binary Star Into the dark, and The Legend of Heroes: Traces of Zero. They have small but passionate fan bases, and stores often only get a few copies specifically for the dedicated gamers who pre-order in advance.
“Pre-orders have been hell lately,” said another employee at another store. “We’re missing several copies of NBA 2K and bulk pre-orders never arrive in time. We can only refund pre-order cancellations in store if they are more than a month old, it doesn’t matter if you paid cash or not.”
While staff must try to explain to frustrated customers why a copy of a game they’ve already spent money on never showed up, the backend issues seem to be messing up stores’ records as well the very sales targets
“I’ve seen 6 customers cancel their pre-orders because they didn’t get theirs,” one person Posted yesterday on the subreddit. “Boss [is] I get annoyed about pre-orders, but I can’t help it [if] People are starting to lose faith in us. What’s the use of pre-ordering a game if you can’t get it anyway.” Some stores have been instructed to deal with the cancellations by offering to back-order the game and have it shipped directly to the customer’s home, an employee said. But they had never heard of a long-term solution about it.
The pre-order fiasco couldn’t have come at a worse time either. September is the beginning of the busy holiday calendar for game release, and while 2022 is sparser than years past, GameStop needs all the help it can get. Meme stock has been on a brutal roller coaster ride since his split in Julyand it is not clear how much a heavily publicized Pivot to NFTs and crypto actually benefits the company.
More importantly, it is another burden to be borne by burned out staff who work more for less. GameStop recently announced this charged stock premiums for store managers not starting until next year, and measly $0.50 raises for everyone else. At the same time, however, the company is tightening the screws, forcing managers to oversee multiple stores while others effectively do the work of an assistant store manager for no additional pay.
“I told my manager the other day that I’m going to quit before he takes over his second store because without our assistant manager, I have to work as an assistant manager with pretty much no pay and the stress,” said a current employee. “I don’t even have a new job lined up, I just don’t want to deal with it.”
