Yet another Gamestop story.

[VertigoProcess]

What gets me is that they put the guide in a trashcan. And if they did it once, how many times have they done it before? Guides can be pretty hefty, so how many tons of paper have they sent to the landfill? I mean, I take issue with them getting thrown out at all, but if you're doing that, then for crying out loud, put them in the recycle.

I work at target, and every week this happens to magazines books and game guides at least a shopping cart full a week... covers ripped off and thrown right in the compactor...

[soloman]

From a business standpoint there's no point in keeping these cases because there's literally nothing you can do with them. As a fad based market, the supply of video games will almost always exceed the demand. When you're selling less than a dozen PS2 games a week, what else are you going to do with that inventory but remove it? The two or three people actually interested in buying a complete copy of 10-year-old-game-XYZ far outweighs the hundreds of customers who shop there daily buying games that cost 10x as much.

If I owned Gamestop, I would take it a step further by destroying excess quantity of any game below a set price. If you've ever seen the backroom of a Gamestop it's literally four rows of EA sports titles and garbage no one wants. They will never move that stock. Ever. They destroyed all their original Xbox merchandise which basically amounted to a million copies of some sports title nobody cared about. Anything of value, like Knights of the Old Republic, was cleaned out. Rummaging through my local store's GBA bin, there are cheap looking games I've never even heard of (or actually wanted to hear about).

Yes, but are they sent to a landfill or a recycling center?

Depends on the state. Some states require recycling of paper materials.

With that said, some plants aren't equipped to handle the glossy material strategy guides are printed on.

Apparently I don't have all the facts... but regardless the tablet market is extremely competitive now with so many major company's making them...

There's no "gamer" tablet though and that's a potential market. Statistics have shown that gaming is one of the highest (if not the #1) thing people do on phones. Polls have shown that people are willing to pay for "premium" games (basically anything over $5) and that the biggest barrier of entry is a lack of controller. If a tablet is released that provides the support and functions of what you'd expect coupled with both high quality and cheap games (the latter being the whole point of kongregate which is highly successful for Gamestop), a gaming tablet could be very successful. Apple has a very neutral position with gaming and they've been this way since the beginning (Apple IIs proved to be a popular platform but it was never intended or designed with games in mind). Gamestop is making $400+ million profit and climbing yearly, they're powerful enough to release something like this.

Truth of the matter is, Gamestop doesn't make as much money from used games as people think they do and the profit gap from used games and their own endeavors is widening. Last fiscal year they made about 45% of their profit from used games the rest comes from their digital platforms and new hardware/software.

[G-Boobie]

I went Amazon Prime a couple of years ago, and I've never looked back.

[Carnby]

Sometimes great items can be found at gamestop when it is their mistake. For example I found a copy of Resident Evil 4 Premium Edition PS2 (mint/complete) in the used section. It was priced the same as a used copy of the regular version (8 dollars.) The cashier was so upset that he didn't notice it before I did.

[Ludwig]

Geeze. I can't stop thinking of how much this generation of gaming sucks. Between manuals diminishing, DRM screwing over legitimate customers, DLC justifying greed, game cases getting cheap and flimsy, and now retailers getting rid of collector's material, I could almost cry. I'm done with consoles after this generation I think.

Yes, it sucks from that perspective but we finally get fresh ideas again. Most of the 00's been worse. It's the golden age of the independent developer, many great games actually getting made because now they don't really need a publisher anymore thanks to digital distributing. Something a bit like that happened before and it changed the way we play.

As far as DRM goes: Yes - it sucks! Sadly though they do it because they can. Look at EA with their origins stuff, everyone is whining, but everyone will still get their BF3 and MassEffect3. I'm still hoping for a revolution, but i doubt anything like that will ever happen.

[Mark III]

Even independent stores sometimes have to do this. At work we throw away pretty much any non 1st party N64 box and manuals. Unless it's an Ogre Battle or something. For some reason people just like buying the cart onlys and don't even look at the boxed games, they take up a lot of room and almost never sell. At one point I even opened up new copies of Perfect Dark, Turok 2 and Megaman Legends to throw away the box and put the bare carts out on the shelf once we ran out of used copies. They sold no problem even though the new ones a few rows down were the exact same price. Weird.

[VertigoProcess]

Even independent stores sometimes have to do this. At work we throw away pretty much any non 1st party N64 box and manuals. Unless it's an Ogre Battle or something. For some reason people just like buying the cart onlys and don't even look at the boxed games, they take up a lot of room and almost never sell. At one point I even opened up new copies of Perfect Dark, Turok 2 and Megaman Legends to throw away the box and put the bare carts out on the shelf once we ran out of used copies. They sold no problem even though the new ones a few rows down were the exact same price. Weird.

Maybe people just assumed they were more expensive? Didn't even bother looking at the price difference?

[soloman]

Frankly, I avoid cardboard boxes if I can. They either come in really, really good condition... or they're falling apart and smell. There's rarely an inbetween. Sega's late-gen Genesis and Sega CD cardboard boxes are horrendous and seem to be designed specifically to degrade after 10 years no matter what condition they're kept in.

I would definitely keep a box that had some value like Perfect Dark or Mega Man Legends, but there's not a huge demand for a complete copy of Turok 2 and I won't lose sleep over not having the box on my shelf.

[ReaXan]

this guy explaines why gamestop sucks so much

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-wTit...feature=relmfu
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2k6KoFTzfc

[Tanooki]

And this cartoon also illustrates in a very funny way unlike that annoying attention whore linked above why Gamestop stucks from the counter.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature...&v=onEfmC6HRF4