Do you buy games retail?
My last few unproductive trips to EB Gamestop have led me to the same conclusion as Penny Arcade: Gamestop is now solely a used games store. You can also preorder games there, so it’s like they’ve combined their used games business with a limited Amazon.com that you have to walk to. (I prefer the magical Amazon.com that lives inside my web browser.)
I still forget to order some games that I want on launch day, and Best Buy has been surprisingly helpful in this department. No, they won’t sell you a PC game– I think that’s illegal now– but there’s a much higher chance that I can find a new game at Best Buy than Gamestop. Plus, as a limited time bonus, the staff won’t call you back a few days later asking you to sell the game back to them for $10.
Clearly, my best bet is still online. If I can wait until a week after release, GoGamer usually has the game on sale at a significant discount. (Many PC games go for $35. ) It probably won’t be too long before all this unpleasantness with boxes and discs is a historical curiosity. Until then, I still have to find someone willing to exchange one of their game boxes for my $60 and a chance to advertise GameInformer or a new credit card at me, much like a timeshare presentation.
Do you still buy games retail? Or have you learned the hard discipline of waiting for the Amazon box?
November 5th, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Well, hrmmm…
I do buy a fair amount at retail, largely at Fry’s or Best Buy. Fry’s has the advantages of wider selection and being the easiest to completely duck salespeople and anything they might be forcing on you (their attempt at a Fry’s card at checkout is half-hearted at best, and barely recognizable as English generally); Best Buy has a distinct advantage of having some semblance of order to their games and being more or less on my way home from work. Amazon beats them both when I’m not in a huge rush and just need to add a few games to my “waiting to play” pile.
And I do wander over to gamestop, but that is largely because it is across the street and next to the safeway I shop at. And honestly I get more used stuff from them than not; generally it is a safer bet than an ebay game for not too much more (although Bioshock and Gears of War are selling used for a sickening $54 last I checked - highway robbery really).
I’m a bit mixed on buying games online - I certainly have the bandwidth to handle it, it is environmentally friendly and pretty easy; but I find that I’m a collector in addition to being a consumer. I like having the box and manual and having them all sit on their little shelf… part of me actually wants to have an orange box sitting on my shelf somewhere.
-geoff
November 6th, 2007 at 2:30 am
As someone who’s made a table out of all those old box covers, I agree about having the real thing.
It’d be somewhat mitigated if I could have confidence that I could download and play the game I bought 5 or 10 years down the line, but that seems almost guaranteed not to happen.
Still, given the choice of going down to BestBuy to look for Assassin’s Creed, vs. just telling my XBox to buy it when it pops up, I think I’d always pick the latter. Even given Valve’s rather scary recent behavior of locking people out who unknowingly bought out of region copies. Whoops. Maybe I’ll be eating my words as soon as MS and Sony can do the exact same thing.
November 6th, 2007 at 8:59 pm
No. I still *visit* my local Gamestop, but I’m not sure why — I never buy anything. The only things that I consider buying are obscure used titles, and in those cases I get scared because I can’t read the reviews online right there in the store.