Post-scavenging guilt

As many of you probably know, the future UK video game store GAME is looking very shaky at the moment. I'm sadly writing this and wondering if I'll actually finish it before they go into administration. After hearing that they were doing a huge sale on their pre-owned games I made sure to get down and see what was available. In the Newcastle area it's possible to visit a total of six shops in the GAME group without really trying and I'd been hearing of some great titles available for under a fiver. These included Bayonetta and Vanquish, which I already owned but I was hopeful there would be some gems that I didn't. Overall it was a mixture of reasonable deals, stuff that I was just about willing to take a chance on and stuff that still seemed surprisingly overpriced. Sadly I was probably a little bit late to the party but I don't think that it was much different from the selection that they would normally have.

I felt kinda guilty at taking advantage of their tough situation and at the same time paying so little when none of it goes to the game creators. This was especially true of the XBLA triple pack as I was interested in all of them and I could probably have picked them up in online sales for a similar combined price. It feels worse to potentially be taking money away from an indie developer than a major publisher, though I don't know what kind of deal they would all have got from being part of this pack in the first place.

The Force Unleashed 2 was right on the edge of my impulse buy zone and on reflection I could have probably found a cheaper copy online brand new but there you go. I've heard that it's not that great and pretty short but I kinda liked the first one and I'd like to see what they do with the story, despite the fact that the first one didn't really need a sequel to link into the original films. There were others that seemed a little too pricey even if I would have been interested in them - BlazBlue and Dark Souls were both around £30, which was for the special editions but I think I've had enough of oversized cardboard boxes and art books. I also wouldn't know anyone that would want to pay the extortionate amount of ten pounds for this...

The regular staff seemed pretty pleasant all things considered, I chatted briefly with the guy on the till when I was buying the XBLA triple pack; The pot luck nature of where it would have been stored in the alphabet, whether I'd played any of them before now and that it worked out as quite a good deal considering their regular online prices. He completely forgot to ask me whether I had a reward card so I didn't feel like asking to redeem all of my points at that point, it would have just felt like I was rubbing the situation in. However the managers on tills still seemed to stick to their approved scripts, seemingly oblivious to the current circumstances. I mean I suppose you could say that one of them was only doing the same thing as the other guy and attempting to chat to me about one of my purchases (Force Unleashed 2) but he launched into a sales pitch for the new Star Wars branded Xbox. When I said I already had a slim with Kinect he suggested I trade that in so that the Star Wars Xbox would only cost me £150 when it's released in May! He also made a point of ordering me a new loyalty card as it had a slight crack in it so I felt no guilt then in asking to use up my accrued credit.

That experience seemed to sum up the Game situation as a whole; staff at the lower end of the chain who are still interested in games and can have real conversations with people and out of touch managers trying to upsell or get pre-orders. And sadly it'll probably be the managers and those responsible for the sorry state the chain is in who come out of the whole predicament the best. I've sadly experienced being made redundant twice in my life already and if I was in the shoes of the staff there I would be actively searching for my next job. I don't think I would have any loyalty left, even if there is the remote possibility that a buyout could turn things around. With GameStop touted as the most likely buyer, I don't think they would actually change much about the stores as they have a pretty similar model in the US and have just been lucky to still survive. They have become a shop that I will only buy from out of convenience, when I absolutely have to have something new to play that day. Outside of the biggest selling games they've not been a shop I could rely on to pick up new stuff for a long time - even on the release date, which was the case with Okamiden a little while back. I can't think of much more to say, other than to wish their hard working staff the best over the coming weeks.