Opinion: Your Local Game Store is Going Bust

Your local games retail store is going out of business.

It'll take a while to play out, but it's happening. It's just a matter of time before sad-faced staff members are given their slips, shelving is auctioned off, windows are whitewashed. Eventually, your beloved emporium of fun will be turned into a place to buy gruesomely-packaged cleaning products.

Whether you visit a cozy hobby store or a chain-outlet that's dedicated to gaming or some monolithic electronics warehouse, it makes no difference. All are headed for oblivion.

Even last week, Best Buy closed a bunch of stores and booted a gaggle of luckless staff out of its smoothly sliding electronic doors.


Sooner or later you and everyone else you know will cease to buy games in boxes, and will consume them, entirely, via downloads. Probably you have already begun to buy games as purely digital entities.

These games are elegantly and silently shipped to you down wires. They are delivered through blinking devices while you seek a slightly more comfortable position on your couch. There is no call for rumbling trucks, stacked pallets, shopping malls. You don't have to worry about parking or reserving a copy or dealing with that infinitely bored young woman as she offers up the unconvincing benefits of a rewards card.

But despite their many short-comings, retailers serve an essential role for we gamers and for the wider games industry. When they finally go, it will come at a price for everyone.

What's most disconcerting is that the games retail outlets aren't just going to be victims of history, not merely the collateral damage of progress. They are to be systematically wiped out by their closest friends and their most bitter rivals, the games publishers.



Entirely plausible rumors are circulating that both Microsoft and Sony will release next-gen consoles that tie the user to the new games they buy. This will, effectively, drastically reduce the value of used games. Leaving aside the moral issues of such a move (I have previously described the elimination of used games as a crime against consumers), such a change badly damages retailers who make a significant proportion of their income trading in second-hand games.

Some are suggesting that this is a stitch-up; that Sony and Microsoft have cooked up this dirty scheme. Such talk is nonsense. They don't need to do anything nefarious. Their busy little friends in publishing have been urging just such a move for years. Because there is nothing the games publishers loathe so completely as the used games business.

Look at it from the publishers' point of view. Three years development. Hundreds of people. Millions of dollars investment. Blood, sweat, tears and all the incredible stress of creative innovation. And the major beneficiary of all this is the guy who rents a few square feet in your local mall and hustles gamers. Fact: GameStop makes more money than Electronic Arts.

Retailers operate according to ferocious and unforgiving metrics. There comes a tipping point at which it is no longer profitable to rent space in the mall, stack boxes, hire cash-register serfs and sell games. And without the easy revenue from used games, that tipping point moves rapidly in the wrong direction. When this thing goes down, it'll happen fast and it'll happen hard.

Here's the trouble with retailers. They don't actually make anything. Their stores are uniformly bland, unlovable spaces entirely crafted around their needs and not yours.


One example – at the larger electronic stores a man is hired to 'greet' you as you enter the shop, and occasionally checks your bags for stolen goods on the way out. As if this assumption of felony isn't insulting enough, you've been forced to line up and wait to purchase your goods because the corporate masters are too tightfisted to hire enough staff to man the tills. Meanwhile, Greeting Goon is inspecting his fingernails.

Shopping for games should be a wonderful experience. But it's not. Retail is too much about money and not enough about experience. The retailer's interest in you feels like it's rooted in the dreary mechanics of shelf-space ratios or upsell margins. (I know there are nice, cool, helpful people who work at retail, and some chains are better than others, but I'm referring to the general experience here.)


Buying digitally is a greater pleasure. If you have a terabyte hard drive, a super-fast connection and a pleasing Steam-like hub, downloading is better than visiting the store.

We are all getting used to the idea of owning things that don't physically exist. CDs are absurd. DVDs are clumsy. Game boxes are unnecessary. Leaving aside the enthusiast who enjoys limited editions and the ownership of things, packaging is dead.

The publishers know this and so, by blocking the next-gen consoles from used games, they are merely giving events a little nudge in their desired direction. Because when used games disappear, they get to take more money out of the system. They get to control the games-buying economy.

The hardware companies go along with this because, guess what, they are games publishers too.