High Street Blues Comments by Rob Fahey

How about a bunch of unique shops including second hand goods? Much better than a bunch of homogenized overpriced crap that no one really wants or needs. So a bunch of sweatshops in India and Cambodia can't churn out shoddy clothing 24 hours a day, oh the humanity! Woolworths can't push the latest "hip-hop" sweatshirts or whatever they've decided the kids want. I don't give a squirt of piss about any of these corporate bastards. This is a *healthy* downturn. Why all the long faces!?

Never mind being able to buy games, dvds, etc. cheaper on online stores in the case of Zavvi all you had to do was walk around the corner to your local Gamestop, Game, HMV and you would pick them up cheaper.

In one of their stores here in Ireland (Newbridge) they had a stock clearance of DVDs etc you would have thought they would be trying to shift the games too but nope. They were still full price and in a lot of cases you could walk around the corner to Gamestop and pick up the games anywhere from €20 to €35 cheaper.
Also remember them trying to sell GT5:Prologue for €60.

No wonder they went out of business.

The only game I bought from a Zavvi/Virgin in the last 5 years was Mass Effect when it was reduced to £19.99 Before that, the previous purchase was probably my new Dreamcast! Their prices have had little grounding in reality for a long time, it is only with current events that they have finally slipped off the razor's edge. I have bought downloaded stuff - for PC. And only because I could burn myself a physical copy with the CD key in a text file on the disc as well.

I think the market will contract, but until the hardware simply doesn't use physical media, there will always be retail outlets for games.

The article studiously ignores the supermarkets, for example. Gaming didn't start out in specialist shops.

With shops falling by the wayside it's an impressively bleak future of social alienation.

Maybe town centers will look more like leisure parks with a cinema, bowling alley and town hall.

You mean they'll look like PS3 Home? Except maybe livelier?

"On a separate topic - What I do not understand is why Game are looking to continue their expansion in these bad economic times - surely a focus on consolidating their current assets is more important than spending money on widening their reach. "

Market leaders love, just *love* recessions. It hurts them too in the short term but in the medium-long term they are left with less competition and can take the piss even more with their anti-competitive ways - something Game are also market-leaders at already ...

I didn't even notice that Zavvi were making a push into the games market really. HMV has started doing pre-owned, but I never saw any pre-owned in Zavvi and the Picadilly Circus shop near my office had a paltry selection of games considering its size. When I went in there before Xmas looking for Left 4 Dead, they had no copies of it (probably due to EUK's demise) and they were still asking for £39.99 for Halo 3.

Zavvi was a dinosaur, and its demise does not surprise me really. Why go in there when I can get cheaper games and a better selecyion in HMV, Gamestation or online?

@metalangel

Unforunately not, which means there are at least 2 Game stores taking the piss.

I'm just outside Belfast myself, in Newtownabbey.

@beckyh

AFAIK it's legal to sell for higher than RRP, just not good practice with long-term customers. Piss those off and cut your nose off to spite your face.

The article studiously ignores the supermarkets, for example. Gaming didn't start out in specialist shops.

That's a very good point actually, I remember the old Spectrum games that my friends used to buy in Newsagents and local independent toy shops...and I had to get my Atari 2600/7800 games from Toys R Us (twice a year, as the nearest one was about 70 miles away!)

The first dedicated games 'shop' that I remember was when I used to buy my Master System games via the post from Special Reserve, otherwise it was Woolworths etc for the High Street.

this may not just be a problem limited to our choice of entertainment here.

i was reading an article in last months top gear about the demise of the american car industry. and it does sound familiar to whats going on with high street retailers today.

basically, the us car industry has its roots based around the fact that they thermselves own the factories were the cars are built. which means if the cars arent selling the factory loses out, job cuts and then an empty factory which still needs paying for. over in europe, cars like the boxster are made in the same factory in sweden as the corsa, saabs and some fords.and in austria, one factory is responsible for making many bmw's, audi's and vdubs. these factories arent owned by the car makers so they dont have the overheads and are responsible for a fraction of the cost if the car industry collapses, as it has done.

you take this to entertainment. while movie studios and game devs arent responsible for their own outlet chains, they still shoulder some of the cost if the store goes under because people still believe in high street shopping. the amount of choice for the foot slogger becomes less and less competition drives up prices, as was seen in the end of the format war. the online retailers will then naturally take up some of the slack mainly because its vastly cheaper to have a warehouse and a mailing operation than it is to rent and run a 'bricks and mortar' high street chain, with its business rates (which are crippling in the town where i live - stockton), overheads and staffing costs. it costs play absolutely fuck all to store a copy of lbp in its warehouse and next to fuck all to get it mailed because something that size can fit through my letter box. add this to the fact that play are based in jersey, a tax haven, and you can really see why they are making the assurgence.

in terms of digital downloads....

i think its the games industry, in one sense, getting greedy and cutting out the second hand market. i vehemently oppose digital downloads mainly because my woman would leave me if i didnt give her something to unwrap at chrimbo. i love having the box in my hands. for music, the .mp3 is going to do more harm to the very talented album designers than the cd did over vinyl. who can forget the sprawling, find-something-new-every-day cover artwork of sepulturas 'arise' to the elegant simplicity of the 'beaucoup fish' cover from underworld?

anyway, this debates going to run and run. but the sad truth is, companies make more money when they shoulder less risk, something game, gamestation and hmv have all found out, and why them too, have turned to online retailing, just another part of the 24 hour selling that it is britain

Its annoying to find that increasingly im going shopping to find a game on the cheap, only to realise i could get it for a little more than half the price online. I miss the days when the game you really want could be picked up in town for immediate enjoyment. Recently the only gem i found was Valkyria Chronicles in gamestation. The last time i was in Woolworths i was probably about 17 and i bought a some shitty single to play in my mums car, Woollys was always a tatty shithole....i wont be missing it.

Can B&M stores compete with online stores? Well maybe.
While online stores are good on price they are pants for convenience. Almost any package bigger than the actual DVD case will result in a trip the Post Office in town on Saturday morning and, unless you get there 30mins before they open, standing in a queue for the best part of an hour. If the guy in front of me has bad BO thats not worth saving a fiver for!

What B&M need to do is, rather than mimic play, amazon et al. with an online store of their own, is provide a service that online cannot. Who needs shelves and shelves of boxes? They should be much more like Argos! The prices could be centrally controlled, updated in real time (well daily at least) online and in the shops - this way they could compete with the offers online. I could reserve or buy and go into town knowing that there would be a copy of Prof. Leyton waiting for me when I got there!
The majority of the store could then be given over to demo units (much like the little bit off to one side in the Oxford Street Virgin/Zavvi) where you could actually try out the game and the rest used for advertising.
There are two added bonuses of this setup too. Idiot parents who are about to buy 18 rated games for 9yr olds can be shown the content before they buy; and shop staff might actually be able to tell you something about the games because we all know that they'll play themselves when the shop is quiet.

Digital distribution might work but the producers/retailers/distributors really need to figure out the use cases before implementing poorly thought out DRM and download restrictions. And there needs to be a way to share/play your games when not at your machine. If i download Mario Party 13 why can't i play it at a friends house? I can if I have the disc! If I have found a game so great that I want to force it on my friends how about allowing me to send them a copy (figuratively, they would have to download it themselves obviously) that they can play for a reasonable amount of playtime? After all, I would let them borrow the disc from me! As for pricing and distribution; When I look for a game only one site (of the few available) seems to have it. This seems like its probably an unfair restriction on trade and I'm sure in time either UK or EU law will come to the rescue on this and prices will hopefully come down as there is more and more competition.

Complete side note, but some of us still prefer CD's and Vinyl as mp3s sound like cack on a semi-decent hi fi. I know you can get lossless downloads, but the fact is these are not common (esp for purchase as opposed to illegal download) and the output from a standard PC will not be up to the same standard of a mid-range CD player/Turntable.

I've pretty much converted over from buying my games and hardware in the shops to buying 99.99% of my stuff online, including DVDs, BDs and the odd CD. I rarely buy locally except if I have to trade something in at GAME for something else. Why pay over the odds in high street shops when the same things can be bought off the net much cheaper?

"this, after all, is a USP which online simply can't replicate"

http://www.cex.co.uk/

I actually like the idea of having my entire collection within the player itself. All my songs on an ipod. All my movies on a hard disk DVD player. All my games on my console. So that I can simply pick one to play and away you go. No getting up, opening boxes, putting in discs every time I wnat to switch games etc. My only problem with digital downloads is the DRM situation. The 360 is one of the worst with your purchases tied to the hardware and no way to change it within your profile. If you;re not connected online you can;t play what you genuinely purchased. I don't want to feel like I'm renting games, music or films as I do with Microsoft and iTunes. I want to know I own the damn thing and that if my hardware goes kaput I can still use my purchased items on something else. I want to know I cna play it whenever and wherever I want. It's not so much wanting my collection on display on a shelf but more to know that my collection is safe and completely mine.

Perhaps its telling that both firms are committing themselves to second hand sales, much to the annoyance of the game publishing industry - this, after all, is a USP which online simply can't replicate.

Amazon Marketplace?

B+M will suffer with the second hand market as well. I was in Game the other day and Little Big Planet was £34.99 second hand, So I got it via play.com play/trade for £14.68 NEW (still shrinkwrapped in the sony plastic). Part of the trouble is overheads from the rent of city center premises, which have been going up faster than the property market did (although woolworhs owned most of it's stores).

On a side not, I found that HMV will give up to double Game will for trade-ins?? was getting ~£15 for some wii games at hmv and game were me offering between £3 and £8 for the same ones.