Gamestopping

This might sound a bit strange, coming from someone who raffled off an EB Games gift card at a recent promotional appearance. But there’s a very big difference between supporting the gaming industry by shopping at EB, and supporting EB by shopping at EB. If you’re sagely nodding your head, then you know what I’m talking about; if that sentence came off as confusing as heck, then this piece is for you.

In North America, Gamestop (and the Canadian company it now owns, EB Games) is the rule of the day if you’re looking to buy games from a brick-and-mortar store, unless you’re lucky enough to have a good indie game shop in your area. Gamestop is all about pushing the used games on you as opposed to new copies, and they take this extremely seriously. A couple years ago, I noticed that the yellow-stickered “used” stickers on the games had all been replaced by green stickers that said “recycled”. I had no idea what that meant in this context, so I asked an employee, who awkwardly answered that administration had decided the yellow stickers in combination with the word “used” reminded people too much of certain bodily functions, so they were changed.

I can honestly say I would never have thought of that if they hadn’t drawn attention to it by changing it.

And with that, we enter the strange world of Gamestop’s used game policies.

You probably know that stores use a whole checklist of psychological tricks to maneuver your shopping experience to their benefit, and speaking from experience, Gamestop and EB are no exception. (As a Canadian, I’m most familiar with EB, but I’ll be using them interchangeably)

Gamestop lays out their stores in a way that’s meant to funnel you towards the used games rather than new, which is an inverse of most stores, which try to funnel you towards new merchandise. The last time I visited the Gamestop in the Charleston town centre in West Virginia (just so any West Virginians can fact-check me to see if it’s still like this), they had laid out all the used games in the front of the store, making you do more legwork and look harder if you wanted the new copies. In my local EB, meanwhile, the PS3 and 360 sections had their new on-display titles cut down by half one day, whereas the used sections got no such handicap, thus forcing people to shop used simply by removing the alternative.

In fact, I’ve had numerous Gamestop clerks ask me, as I hand them the new game I picked out, “Oh, we have a recycled version of this for $19.99 instead of $24.99, would you rather have that instead?” or “Oh, we have a recycled version of this, it’s just as good, you can check the blu-ray if you want!” I understand that it’s not their fault and that they’re coached to do this, but it really says something that you’re still prodded about the used games even after you’ve made your choice to buy new. They’re really uncomfortable with the idea of the creators of the media getting enough money to eat.

I should take a moment here and explain why creator royalties in video games are a different beast than royalties in other creative fields.

Once a console generation fades into the past and no more games are produced for it, you can consider every game on that system to be out-of-print. (Essentially, everything from the Gamecube-era and earlier can safely be considered OOP) For those of you who are really new to this, out-of-print means that no new copies of that item will be produced. Once that last copy goes off the shelf and into someone’s shopping bag, the creators of that title are officially done getting royalties from that title, because the only avenues the game will then be sold at are used vendors. Time to start thinking of a new game if they want to keep food on the table.

Meanwhile, take music: Iron Maiden are still raking in royalties from their 1986 album Somewhere In Time (for example), whereas a game made around that time will have been deep out of print for decades now. The Maiden CDs and LPs are still being printed and re-printed, and iTunes downloads are going strong, but that 80s game cartridge? If you want it, you’ll either be emulating it or tracking down the original game through a used vendor, and neither grant royalties to the creator.

So that’s how game royalties work differently than creator royalties of music, film, books and other art. It might sound like I’m telling you to go ahead and buy used from Gamestop, save a few bucks because the royalties from an individual game drying up is an inevitable fact of the gaming industry. But I’m not. I’m really, really not.

The problem is, Gamestop’s used game policies are an irregular wrench in the royalty machine. New games grant royalties to the creators; used games grant money to Gamestop in full. It becomes pretty easy to see why Gamestop pushes the used games so much: they make more money, at the expense of the creators of the media we love so much. So it’s also easy to see how a system like this is bad for the industry’s sustainability in its current state. Gamestop force a system that is a calculated attack against the creators of the very media they sell – it’s utter insanity.

(TotalBiscuit explains it here, around the six-minute mark. As his explanation goes on, he actually touches on a number of the same points I make here – and this is the first time I’m watching this!)

Gamestop has more-or-less a monopoly on brick and mortar game shops, other than indie holdouts. A monopoly, by the way, is bad: it’s how we got Wal-Mart pressuring manufacturers into working beyond their means to manufacture product on the cheap, and how we got the recent Amazon Versus Readers scandal. So with all that money floating around, you’d think that Gamestop would hold itself to a reasonable standard with its used games, right?

What was that I mentioned in an earlier article?

I bought a used copy of Assassin’s Creed II, and while I know you buy imperfect when you buy used, this was just…my word. When I went home and got it out of the bag (mind, it was a different copy than the display-case I took to the counter), the case was all sticky and nasty for some reason, the manual was missing, and most importantly the disc had several scratches on it. The first thing that went through my mind (other than a sigh at how bafflingly terribly some people treat the very things that they spend their own hard-earned money on) was that I had to exchange it for a copy that wasn’t cruddy.

Yes, that was at EB. Trust me, that wasn’t half as bad as some of the garbage they try to peddle as used games: go into any EB and you’ll surely find some used titles with the cover stripped off entirely, and the title written in sharpie. The worst offender: a copy of Arkham City in just a blank, clear PS3 case. To wit, just look up any Kitchen Nightmares episode where Gordon Ramsay walks into the diner and finds a dead rat in the walk-in freezer. Like, that all-encompassing silent declaration of, We have utterly no standards.

And they won’t particularly care to tell you if the used game you’re buying didn’t come with, like, cool inserts or a manual, or if the version they’re pulling out of the back has a screwed-up case. They’ll just act like this is something that a business can just do. And, given they have no real competition any more, I guess they can.

I mean, really? Why is the continent’s most prominent game store treating their fare like a flea market? And not even a good flea market with standards and practices, but one of those bad flea markets where that one creepy vendor keeps trying to sell you DVD bootlegs of Bumfights and Triumph Of The Freaking Will.

Protip: if you absolutely have to buy used from Gamestop, get the warranty. It’s a ripoff generally, but considering how low Gamestop/EB’s quality control is on the used games, it’s like you’re paying EB to save you from their crappiness. I wouldn’t have been able to return that aforementioned scratched copy of ACII if I hadn’t gotten the warranty.

Here’s a hard truth for Gamestoppers: if someone values the physical integrity of their product that little, then they’re probably not even buying the physical product. They’re just playing it on Steam, or on an emulator.

Gamestop also push the whole “trade in three games that were released earlier this year and get the new one half off!” angle pretty hard. It encourages a cycle of consumption and disposal, which is easy enough for entertainment collectors like me to just ignore entirely. But I do have to say – when you treat something as disposable for a long enough time, you can trick your brain into actually thinking that it IS disposable. And then a couple months down the line, when you have a hankering to re-play that game you impulsively traded in to get the new CoD or whatever…

…well, I’m sure your local Gamestop will have a couple used copies on the cheap.

That would have been a pretty decent way to end this, but to close out, I’d like to just take a look at some of the independent game stores that hang on by the skin of their teeth, yet still retain a friendly atmosphere instead of being a huge corporation that yet still refuses to protect your product unless you pay extra.

What has Gamestop/EB done for you lately? Because one of my favourite indie game shops (Check ’em out, and get yourself there if you live on this side of the Greater Toronto Area!) has gone out of their way for me in ways that you would never see from Gamestop. See: having one of the employees run to their house to get (in 2007) God Of War for me, and (in 2012) the original Silent Hill.

Meanwhile, I’ve asked EB employees about games they didn’t have in stock at the moment, and have had them straight-up refuse to see if their other locations in the area had it in. Full disclosure, that event happened on Boxing Day, but even so – the biggest shopping day of the year is all the more reason to redouble on customer service.

So, to wit – Gamestop and EB provide worse customer service than the indie shops in my experience, they’re very pushy re: the used games yet have vanishingly low standards for the quality of these products, and in doing so, they aggressively try and trick you into supporting a system that actively harms the creators of the media.

And a monopoly does mean that most consumers of physical games in North America have no choice but to buy from Gamestop/EB if they want to buy from brick and mortar shops. Just imagine how much it would harm the industry if everyone started just buying EB’s used games at every opportunity instead of giving the money to the creators with new copies. When a game is OOP, the only option to get yourself that nice ol’ physical copy is to buy used, and that’s okay. But when a game is still relatively new? You’d be better off pirating the game outright than buying used from Gamestop, because if for some reason you absolutely have to deny creators their royalties, at least then you can do it without putting money into the pockets of the tosspots who have successfully turned the denial of creator royalties into a cornerstone of their operation.

Or, you know…buy new, and save everyone a bit of headache, yeah?

Now, while there’s probably a lot to be said about Gamestop bullying developers into doing Gamestop-exclusive DLC codes, I honestly don’t know enough about that to make much of a statement on it, so I’ll just go ahead and drop things here.

(Also, while I have certain inside knowledge about the media manufacturing industry, I’ve never worked at Gamestop nor do I know anyone who works in their higher positions, so for all I know, I could be wrong about a number of facts in this article. If so, please tell me! Thanks!)

And that takes us out of 2014 and into Back To The Future II. Play hard, read deeply, take in the music and enjoy the movies and shows while you’ve got some winter break left. See you on the other side of the new year!