I honestly don't understand the source of all the hate for Gamestop. I use it quite frequently. The fact of the matter is that Gamestop is a business and doesn't feel like openly promoting the use of another competing business. You don't buy a Big Mac packaged with coupons for Burger King. And I have personally never had one ounce of trouble with them. In fact, their employees have inspired rather interesting conversations about the gaming industry with me.

All this "Gamestop is the devil" is ridiculous in my experience. Just thought I'd throw out my two cents.

OneFiercePuppy: "if you hate video games and everything they stand for." I assumed that video games stand for nothing more than being entertaining. Gamestop allows me to be entertained with multiple promotions and a good atmosphere. Please though, enlighten me how Gamestop has actually managed to make the game you are buying less enjoyable.

That is true, but bear in mind that this game activates on Steam, which competes with GameStop's own digital distribution service, Impulse. Between Steam and OnLive I know which one I'd be more worried about losing sales to.

I've never been much of a fan of the G.S. sucks because the devs don't get kickbacks on used game sales argument. Sometimes submarkets rise from others and that's just how it works. For whatever reason there was a real need that the game companies weren't able and/or interested in fulfilling which GameStop has been meeting, as well as supplying thousands of jobs and offering one of, if not the, largest physical storefront for new game sales. There may be some wishing on the dev's part that they were in on the action, but unless they are able to render a solution that meets customer demand and can supplant the existing supplier, then this is how it has to and should be. No other producer of goods gets to cry foul or demand a cut when someone resells something that they purchased.

Buying and reselling is the base line for damn near every business and consumers have been given the right to do the same. Quite frankly if game devs step in and make that impossible then I think that is something that we should be very unhappy about. I like being able to get old games. I don't get stuff right away, and there are things I enjoyed playing when I was younger that devs simply aren't interested in making available. The only thing G.S. did was make buying and selling used product accessible to every day people. And they couldn't do it if every day people weren't interested in taking advantage of both of those abilities.

Sure. It's pretty straightforward. Gamestop offers games at a lower price than new, which appeals to the younger gamer who may either have a job which pays poorly or be working within the confines of an allowance. There's no problem with that, strictly. But by existing as a pawn shop for video games, it generates a black market for the good.

For the moment, pass on the free market drivel about how anything that arises naturally in a market is a force for good. I can address that momentarily.

Gamestop, as the most successful business in curbing total volume (units) sold of video games, takes the brunt of the dislike for changes which arise as a result of publishers trying to counteract the resale. This means that Gamestop rightly bears responsibility (though not total) for always-on DRM (a control for individual game units), for games sold incomplete with DLC or registration-unlocked content, and worst of all (in my estimate) for the push in video games for lease rather than ownership of the game you buy.

None of these things are unique to video games; it may be that some or all of them would have been implemented, absent such a thriving parallel economy ( obligatory PA reference ). But as a catalyst it has had an effect.

Now, about that free market thing. It doesn't take much more than a semester or two of economics plus a little attention to decision-making by groups to see that people - and people-driven entities - don't handle very well at all. That's why we have, for example, [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons]the Tragedy of the Commons in public property. The point here is this: not everything that arises in even a notionally free market is good, because a group bias in selfish actors will not be adjusted for by statistical sizes.


I do get what you're saying, but I feel that my argument, above, applies. Specifically, GameStop did not *only* make reselling available to the masses. They inserted themselves as a parasitic medium, siphoning profits from a producer of a good (the video game creators/publishers) without in turn providing a service with an inherent value (say, porting those games to a new platform, testing them, supporting them, etc.)


EDIT: spacing, spelling. The usual.

When I bought the game of the year edition of the original Deus Ex from them, they had removed all of the bonus soundtrack cds from their copys. Its an anti Deus Ex conspiracy all right. The fact that it was an EB Games at the time is irrelevant. When Gamestop bought them out, they bought in on the conspiracy. The probably had something to do with the quality of the second game as well, I'm sure of it.

I would suspect most capitalist would think my personal views of money rather radical, and I'm not really one to default to any freemarket = good thinking. Even so, I have a hard time getting to selling used = screwing devs given the reality of how the world currently works and given precedence in all other reselling of goods. I just seems like it takes a lot of bias or radical thinking to get there.

I was so certain the word parasitic would turn up that I seriously thought about dealing with it up front. The same thing could be said by degrees about many things( video game publishers included.) Lets take GameSpot(and all similar). People that get together for the sole purpose of talking about games in hopes of generating revenue via ad sales. It is created as a direct result of video games existing. It just so happens that the dev's need to advertise their games and the relationship turns not parasitic, but symbiotic. The same with GameStop. They may make the bulk of their revenue via used, BUT their stores are still filled to the gills with advertising for up and coming games because there isn't a better physical location to sell new games than G.S. Both entities are working each other, which again, is symbiotic.

Used game sales are not siphoning profits from game makers, game makers out and out were not even attempting to meet a very understandable need within the gaming public and to that they still fail miserably ( if anything are actively trying to eradicate the current solution.) And it is GameStop meeting this need that is their inherent value. Best Buy doesn't alter or improve upon any of the goods they sell, nor does Walmart, nor does the vast majority of the retail wolrd. They only sell a collection of goods they have amassed in a way that is accessible and convent to the pubic.

I don't feel they can be singled out on this without pointing a finger at a whole host of other companies as well as the entire system that they exist in, the very one the game developers are using for their gain. At which point it all becomes a very different kind of discussion and one I'm not really qualified to have.

As for any of GameStop's other douche-baggary I'm not interested in defending them.

I went back to re-read your other post, so I'm hoping I don't veer off track here. I just wanted to briefly explain why I felt parasitic was an appropriate term for GameStop and not, say, Best Buy. I'm not willing to say you're wrong, mind. I just feel that there's a difference you have not addressed.

" It just so happens that the dev's need to advertise their games and the relationship turns not parasitic, but symbiotic."

Here's the rub I see. GameStop isn't advertising "come and buy this neat game that we have a sign up for and give your money to the developers." They're advertising "come here and buy a copy of this game," and it's not fair to stop there. You and I have both been in GameStop - we both know as soon as you walk in they're more interested in selling you a used copy of whatever you want. Even zero day. Why? Because their profit margin is greater on used sales than on new sales. Even their advertising is explicitly for selling on their black market. That *cannot* be symbiotic. The producer of the game gets no tangible benefit from someone ethereally enjoying their game; they get their benefit from dollars, and GameStop does everything in their power to pull dollars from the devs/pubs and siphon it to themselves. That's benefit to the organism (GameStop) at a cost to the host (the devs/pubs). That's literally the definition of parasite

" Best Buy doesn't alter or improve upon any of the goods they sell, nor does Walmart, nor does the vast majority of the retail wolrd. They only sell a collection of goods they have amassed in a way that is accessible and convent to the pubic. "

And here I think you're not fairly comparing the two. When Best Buy sells a game, they buy the game from the devs/pubs at a lower price than they subsequently resell it to the consumer. When GameStop sells a game, they have often bought it from the consumer at a nominal price to resell it to another potential consumer, thereby removing them from the pool of legitimate consumers who might have otherwise bought the game from the entity that created it. Best Buy performs a service for the maker of a good. GameStop provides a means for an erstwhile consumer to obtain what they want (a good) how they want (by paying less) but without ever actually contributing to the profit that will allow further goods to be made. That goes straight back to my seemingly throwaway phrase earlier about how people don't handle externalities very well at all.

Again, please don't take this as an attack on your position; I don't mean it to be. I do feel, though, that far too many people don't consider the whole situation about black markets or parallel economies, and don't understand the damage they cause. Sometimes it's justifiable. But it's always better to know than not to know.

I agree, the used-game markets with gamestop/eb or similar are like piracy, only worse, because those ass-hats have the audacity to charge almost the full price for something you could either download for free - and have the same net effect - or buy new and actually support the developers.

If people are trading games back and forth to each other, more's the power to them, but when someone sets themself up as an intermediary, or go between, and explicity enters business with a focus on exploiting those who don't know any better, I feel moral outrage.

Come on now, that you don't like it that's one thing, that you consider it to be "morally" wrong that's another, but calling it black market or parallel economies, it's just plain silly.

Publishers sell a license, somebody buy it and the later resell it, for now at least it's perfectly legal and part of the official economy, it's not black market, piracy nor crime against humanity no matter how much you might dislike it.

I hate this place.

Someone wanted to know why I hate Gamestop? Here's a few stories for you.

I bought a game there like 7 years ago. Now this story about Dues Ex is nothing new, they have been opening game boxes and taking stuff out for YEARS. So, 7 years ago I go to buy a game. The guy at the counter looks at it, he sees that it's sealed and he seems very confused. He turns to the other worker next to him and hands him the game box, telling him that's it's sealed. The guy looks at it dumbfounded. I am standing there staring at them like they are a couple of morons. So the guy then says after looking at the box "How much is it? Oh, only 20 dollars? I'm sure it's in there". He then hands the game box back to the other guy, turning his eyes away to something else, as if he couldn't care less.

These guys were looking at a sealed box like it was a rubix cube, it was one of the most stupidiest things I have ever seen. You see, they always open the game boxes, so they didn't quite know what to do when they left one sealed(accidently? who knows).

Recently I bought Street Fighter 4 from there, the day they got it. It wasn't on the shelves yet, so I ask the guy if they had it. He said yeah, so he gets one from the box behind the counter. I'm going through my purse, getting money for it, thinking about other things. But then, I noticed... he opened it! He actually took the wrapping off. I didn't notice if he took anything out, or what he was doing, because I had my attention elsewhere, but I sure wasn't happy. Long story short, I got one with the wrapping on.

Now a story from like 10 years ago. Back in the days when there were still big boxes for computer games. Long story short, I buy a new game, and guess what? There was scotch tape all in the inside. It was like a dog chewed through all the cardboard stuff inside the game box, and then someone scotched taped it up. It was so disgusting! "New" my foot.

Anything that has to do with this place, I absolutely hate. I will never shop there, nor do business with them in any shape ever again.

So then don't buy from them - you aren't being forced. Trade your games with your friends or buy the game new. You are only whining because you think you should be able to get a used copy cheaper and if you can't then download it for free. Whose the Pirate here.

Give the customer a discount, give them a $50 Impulse credit, etc. The problem here is that GS worried about their future bottom line's more than they did their current customers. Typical business BS, where the nebulous term "Customers" takes precedance over the person standing in front of them.

I'm not one to really be bothered by threads going off topic as long as the debate is interesting/civil.

I understand that there is some potential overlap in the first days, though I don't really know to what extent that would be. However, I am sure the game companies do have that worked out and they seem to have come to the conclusion that it is still more profitable to allow Game Stop to sell new games than not. They are, in fact, getting something out of the deal which means it can not be purely parasitic. It may not be ideal, or even be dysfunctional, but there is some level of mutual benefit going on. Taken as a whole and given the other option is the unavailability of used games(possibly even game stores), I am happy to allow that level of compromise. In fact I'm even comfortable with the existence of out and out "parasitic" stores like Vintage Stock or other random "used only" stores.

Through Vintage Stock (they're not everywhere) I have been able to acquire old SNES carts, Dreamcast, Playstation games, and hard to find DVD's that I would have to get from ebay otherwise. Another company which would also have to be classified as purely parasitic. Do I want these places to not exist? Hell no! Companies aren't selling new SNES games and Walmart isn't stalking anything older than two weeks old. As a person that never buys on zero day it can be very hard to find things new outside of such specialty shops that probably couldn't afford to be specialty shops if they weren't selling used in the first place.

This all being said I don't hate on anyone for disliking a company. It often takes a lot of selfishness and greed (maybe some bullying) to pull off running something as big as Gamestop, but like I said I think once you point one finger you have to start pointing a lot more. If you're up for that more power to you, it can get exhausting.

One interesting note about Best Buy, since they came up so much, is that the last time I was in one they were selling used games. Don't know if it was something they were trying locally or if they gave it up but they were definitely doing it at some point recently.

Gamestop is the pirate, which is why I don't buy from them. Thought I made that clear.

And I don't think I should be able to get the games cheaper there either, I don't buy second-hand games at all.

I have no idea why you feel the need to support these guys, but throwing around accusations and empty rhetoric isn't making anything better for anyone.

Well, couldn't have said it better myself.

Sorry - I misunderstood your first paragraph to mean you were downloading games since Gamestop was not selling them cheap enough for you. I stand corrected but still use them for what I need.