Employees of GAME, the UK’s largest video game retailer, have told Eurogamer The retailer should no longer accept trade-ins. Which, if true, would be the end of an era.
GAME is to the UK like GameStop is to the US, the remaining gaming retailer after eating up everyone else. It has been around in some form since 1992 and was purchased by Electronics Boutique in 1999, after which all EBs also changed their name to GAME. But like GameStop and pretty much every other brick-and-mortar physical media retailer, the company has spent the last decade or so clinging to life.
In 2012, GAME went into administration after the financial situation deteriorated so much that major publishers refused to ship inventory. Since then, various new owners have tried everything that will be familiar to US readers, and the remaining stores are now filled with plush toys, Funko Pops, board games, Pokémon cards and anything else that captures the gaming-related zeitgeist. But despite all this, GAME has always taken care of trade-ins. Until now, it seems.
The decision appears to be part of a global trend as physical media struggles to find a reason to operate in a primarily digital space. Best Buy was announced on January 3rd that it would no longer stock DVDs and Blu-Rays, and that physical stores were apparently suffering from closures and layoffs everywhere. But for a Brit, trade-ins at GAME are just part of the reality. They have simply always been there!
Read more: Best Buy will soon stop selling Blu-rays and DVDs
For years I spent my Saturdays and school holidays working in GAME stores after years of hanging around there unpaid. (Previously I was in charge of the VHS department.) Now I take my own child (who has never seen a VHS or even held a DVD) to our nearest GAME for several birthday parties around town Belong attached to. I was the person who arrived with the carrying case full of games, and the person who rejected those games because the CDs had scratches all over them.
Trade-ins have always been a double-edged sword. To their favor, Giant publishers hate thembecause they allow a person to recover value from their own property without having to pay the publisher again for any reason, and moreover It’s funny when giant publishers get angry. To them, it’s a rip-off of customers who pay so much for a product that the store has already sold at full price at least once and only receive a slight discount.
Even though I experienced the game back in the 1990s, I know very well how much we paid for a relatively recently released $60 game (about $25) and how much we sold it for (about $25). .55 US dollars). These markups would be even more pronounced on older games where I would have to offer around $3 and then put a label on it for $15. (But in pounds, of course.) And yes, that’s how free markets work, but there were staggering amounts of free money available for business.
Anyway, this old man’s rant aside, it’s certainly a thing that the used market could prove so worthless that GAME would abandon something that’s been part of the chain’s DNA for 30 years.
We’ve done our best to contact GAME to find out if the rumors are true, but they belong to this now horrible Frasers Group (née Sports Direct), which owns a worrying proportion of the stores on every British high street, and press contacts appear to be few and far between.
If this is a sign of a trend, it is likely that US chains will follow suit. It might be time to clear out the shelves to get some store credit before it’s too late.
