Game & Gamestation: GAME credit woes

[huxley]

If anyone was to buy the chain. The first thing they'd need to do is reduce the amount of stores in a lot of areas.
Example, I was in Brighton yesterday where they have a game and gamestation on the same street only 100 yards apart. As well as a game store in the shopping centre less than a three minute walk away.
Game should of never been allowed to buy gamestation in the first place.

You can thank the US part of Blockbuster for that. It didn't do them any good as they still went tits up. Despite being purchased by dish media the USA stores continue to close. The uk part of blocky is running -8 million in the red.
They expect to profit from game groups downfall, dish will not commit to putting cash into the uk chain.
Tbh I think they are just using blockbuster for the brand name and the exclusive rights to certain studios.
Time will tell.

[EvilBoris]

If there is a buyout, it will take a long time to sort out the companies problems.
When most of those units they have stores in will have 5 year leases on them, they can't just close up.

Many of those duplicate stores in city centres now are probably only running to cover the cost of their rents until their leases expire, which is why we have been seeing store closures over the couple of years.

[Flabio]

The Blockbuster in Guildford town centre closed ages ago. I doubt most people even knew there was one, lousy location they had.

[koopatroopa90]

It wasn't that bad, being next to kfc and McDonald's must have helped them have some "cheap night in" factor! Wasn't even too bad a size, only issue could have been parking but not as bad as some others I can think of...

[Neon Ignition]

That's the main thing, they don't need 3-4 stores within a 1 mile radius or loads of staff, most of whom just wander about the store mithering customers to the point they drive them away. Personally, I have never bought their lazy excuse that the lack of new hardware etc has massively affected profits either. This gen has already sold more units than last year with the 360 alone having its most successful Xmas yet just this last one. The problem isn't that people aren't buying games, it's that they aren't buying them from GAME.

[Flabio]

GAME Group is trending on twitter now. The mainstream news outlets have picked up on the story so it's being widely discussed. Any hope GAME had of the general public not knowing how up the creek they are has gone.

[Brad]

My sister in-law requested Game vouchers for my nephews birthday yesterday. I advised against it :-(

[Daragon]

GAME Group is trending on twitter now. The mainstream news outlets have picked up on the story so it's being widely discussed. Any hope GAME had of the general public not knowing how up the creek they are has gone.

GAME group not stocking Mass Effect 3 was on the BBC news the other week, I think their woes at the very least have been brought well into the public domain prior to this point.

[Finsbury Girl]

A lot of the stores would've been paying bugger all rent - all they would need to cover is the council tax - a lot of the time this is better for the landlord than having a vacant property.

That's why you will see multiple stores in a small area (i.e. no consolidation of stores from the various takeovers), as the marginal cost for keeping an additional store open, from GAMEs point of views was bugger all.

TBH the writing was on the wall when the story of EA refusing to take on counterparty risk with them, got out. Goneski.

[Mr-Niceguy2001]

I went to the one in the west end on saturday. There was hardly anything of note bargains wise. Lots of pre-order POS for Max Payne 3 and it looked like a skeleton crew of staff. Managed to pick up the skyward sword guide book for ?5 and Trauma centre on the Wii for ?2.

Just used the bulk of my reward points to pre-order the new Yakuza on the PS3 that is released this friday, hopefully it will be stocked, as I couldn't see anything worth spending my points on that was in stock on the website. Will use the rest up this week rather than lose them.

Hopefully, what ever happens, the good people who actually made an effort won't lose their jobs.

[Sketcz]

OK, I haven't paid that much attention to all this, or the causes for why they're dying, in fact I don't really know to be honest. But it suddenly dawned on me:

Surely this kind of thing is precisely what every game publisher in the UK had been hoping for? It means the death of one of the major outlets for used games. More significant than even eBay, since by being in close proximity to new games it draws attention away from them.

Could this all be the result, somehow, or some grand conspiracy initiated by game publishers?

Has this theory already been put forward? Is it ridiculous?

I probably should have paid more attention to all this, but why let that get in the way of a good conspiracy theory, eh?

[FelixofMars]

No conspiracy though I think EA may have partially refused to stock them that and wobbly credit.

[Psyduck]

I went into gamestation today to get rid of my store credit and pick up some PSN points instead (as I see at least one other forumite has done). When I took the vouchers to the counter, the guy serving me asked the manager whether they could still sell them, and the manager said yes, and that he'd taken most away and just left the ones they could sell. Not really sure what that means, but sounds to me like if anyone else has credit and is thinking of using it like that you'd probably best do it sooner rather than later.

[koopatroopa90]

A lot of the stores would've been paying bugger all rent - all they would need to cover is the council tax - a lot of the time this is better for the landlord than having a vacant property.

That's why you will see multiple stores in a small area (i.e. no consolidation of stores from the various takeovers), as the marginal cost for keeping an additional store open, from GAMEs point of views was bugger all.

Whilst I agree about rent, as I know the landlord of the shop my girlfriend works in has to pay half the rates if the shop is empty (and hence they are better off letting it for free than not at all!), the rates the shops have to pay can be really high. For a uni project we've been looking at commercial property costs in Guildford and the rates for a shop in a prime location can be upwards of ?100k pa...

Has this theory already been put forward? Is it ridiculous?

Partially, although nowhere near the epic scale of some of your previous theories

[kryss]

If anyone was to buy the chain. The first thing they'd need to do is reduce the amount of stores in a lot of areas.
Example, I was in Brighton yesterday where they have a game and gamestation on the same street only 100 yards apart. As well as a game store in the shopping centre less than a three minute walk away.
Game should of never been allowed to buy gamestation in the first place.

You can thank the US part of Blockbuster for that. It didn't do them any good as they still went tits up. Despite being purchased by dish media the USA stores continue to close. The uk part of blocky is running -8 million in the red.
They expect to profit from game groups downfall, dish will not commit to putting cash into the uk chain.
Tbh I think they are just using blockbuster for the brand name and the exclusive rights to certain studios.
Time will tell.

Blockbuster has died in Canada too. EBGames/GameStop have 5 or 6 shops in Calgary, and none of them are within a mile, let alone walking distance.

I was wondering about the possibility of several companies buying GAME out then splitting shops up, but that's not likely at all. They wouldn't want the competition when they would be running a loss to start with.