Video game retailers

[new member]

As I understand it, chuff all. I can't confirm that though. PWC said that was the case but who knows. I don't see that they have reason to lie about it.

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[Retroid]

S'true, I've seen her glowing weak spot.

Did you flip her over and deal massive emotional damage?

[Unofficial Who]

"OpCapita will also seek to re-employ a small number of staff who previously worked at Game's head office but received redundancy notices last week, it said in a joint statement with PwC."

Re-employ a small number of head office staff, yep, they very people who are responsible for whats happened.

http://www.telegraph...-3200-jobs.html

Hang on. Hang on a fucking minute.

The floor staff get told on yer bike and sorry your entitlements are up shit creek and yet the guys at head office get redundancy? And then get their jobs back?

Seriously....what the fuck?

[DarhkFox]

I went into town saturday - the gamestation was closed (i already knew that from the list).

However i went to GAME and it was closed due to flooding!! Very weird its happened at the same time all this is going on?! Inside job?

[ICECOLD]

It actually wasn't a load of juniors that left. Yeah, there were some lower roles that went but also some very high profile senior roles. But yeah, to say that hiring back some of the HO staff means bringing back the same fuckwits that caused this in the first place is a little misguided. There have been about 70 people that left over the last month and the vast majority of them are in no position to actually have an overriding decision on the day to day running of game. For example, one of the positions was a DBA role, maybe he will make a return. That can't do any harm, surely?!

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Quite. The vast majority of GAME head office comprises lots of people in areas like design, content, merchandising, loyalty, finance, loss prevention and a whopping huge department for customer service.

None of those guys will have any say in the decisions that stuffed GAME up. Hub's comments are ignorant and oversimplified to say the least. It wouldn't suprise me in the slightest if he'd ever worked in an office.

[ICECOLD]

Hang on. Hang on a fucking minute.

The floor staff get told on yer bike and sorry your entitlements are up shit creek and yet the guys at head office get redundancy? And then get their jobs back?

Seriously....what the fuck?

Nobody said Head Office staff got redundancy.

But let's say for argument's sake that they did. Why the outrage? It's one thing to offer redundancy to tens of people on a corporate contract; it's quite another to give it to thousands in a front-line retail role.

People need to get this idea out of their heads that all of the people at head office are the enemy and the shop staff more deserving. It's absolutely shit that any of them lost their jobs, and if some of them from any area are reemployed, then that's a very good thing. All the best to them.

[new member]

Hang on. Hang on a fucking minute.

The floor staff get told on yer bike and sorry your entitlements are up shit creek and yet the guys at head office get redundancy? And then get their jobs back?

Seriously....what the fuck?

They got redundancy notices, they didn't get a redundancy payout though.

edit: never mind, ICE COLD put it better than me

[Unofficial Who]

They got redundancy notices, they didn't get a redundancy payout though.

edit: never mind, ICE COLD put it better than me

Ahhhhhh! I just assumed that the payout would come with the notice.

As you were then gentlemen.

[new member]

Well, Martyn Gibbs is back as the new CEO of GAME. Interesting times ahead.

[Teeohbee]

Hold on, why are Game Bundle deals suddenly being heralded as a genius marketing move?

I thought bundling games and tatt together and refusing to sell separately was one of the shittiest moves around.

The guy even said there was no real saving involved.

[Dudley]

Because it works.

It's not a "genius marketing move" but it's one of the eleven billion things they seemed to forget to do.

See also, back in the day when console deals made no money, we scraped back margin by putting a GAME brand controller into them. There wasn't a saving at all but on one deal in 2003, adding that controller increased the margin on the deal by 1500%. (no joke).

It's potentially not "Better for customers" but it's one of the huge number of little things GAME could do to help them survive that they just forgot about.

[new member]

You'll should also see giftcards reinstated in Game and Gamestation by the end of the week. Good news for all, don't throw those cards away yet.

[second to none]

Why don't Game get involved with store cards or 3rd party credit agreements for big purchases like new consoles? They are missing out on a gold mine.

Most places make more money on high APR credit rather than profit from sales.

Morally it's wrong but surely it's probably the only way they could make a decent profit.

[Ketchup]

The bundling is only a problem when its forced, like on consoles especially at launch. This was just another option, you could buy vanilla Battlefield 2 second hand for X pounds or pay a bit more and get a DLC card with it. As i said, no idea if you saved any money but it was a great way of marketing an older game and potentially pushing something people may not have known about. If all games were forced this way it'd be terrible, but having the option is great, it certainly made me look at the game twice.

I found a second hand Gamecube Memory card box the other day. Bought it from GAME back in the day (probably around 2002) and on the front it was £12.99. An okay price, can't remember if they sold for £15 or £20 new but underneath it reward card customers would get it for £10. It'd been traded in at £5 so a nice profit was made and it gave more reasons to have a reward card. It was stuff like that that helped to sell the cards, as it is now all you get is points.

[ontwofronts]

Why don't Game get involved with store cards or 3rd party credit agreements for big purchases like new consoles? They are missing out on a gold mine.

Most places make more money on high APR credit rather than profit from sales.

Morally it's wrong but surely it's probably the only way they could make a decent profit.

I can remember being stood in the middle of a retail park about 15 years ago when my Sales Director asked me what was being sold here. So I reeled off the usual things; beds, carpets, tv's as I looked at various furniture stores and electrical stores and he just stopped me and said "wrong, they sell credit".

Someone at Game somewhere must have* crunched the numbers and decided they didn't need to bother with going into the credit business. Though when you have Brighthouse with a Vita display in the window, it does make you wonder.

*this may be the point I give them too much credit, pardon the pun!

[new member]

GAME did do a credit scheme for a while using Clydesdale banking. It was fairly popular but it didn't work out too well so it got stopped. I can't actually remember the reasons it was stopped, just that it wasn't paying off as hoped.

[mushashi]

My ex-colleagues on Facebook complaining about RBS, Op Capita and blaming whoever they can for their store closing. I realise they're probably angry and upset at losing their jobs, but they dont seem to be able to see the reality of the situation GAME were in. They also seem convinced someone would of bought the company whole had it not been forced into Administration...

Might have something to do with the reporting that mentioned that RBS specifically cock-blocked a deal with OpCapita that would have prevented the company going into admininstration in the first place as they wanted to buy the entire lot. Seems management called it, admin, jettison off the useless bits, back in the game.

Further to the announcements of 12 March 2012 and 14 March 2012, the board of GAME has assessed the status of the ongoing and regular discussions between GAME and its lending banks and between its lending banks and a potential third party provider of finance to the business.

[Cras]

Bad news for Rick Strider - GAME shares written off as they withdraw from the LSE.

http://www.mcvuk.com/news/read/game-shares-to-be-written-off/

[second to none]

"GAME are cockroaches"

[ontwofronts]

Bad news for Rick Strider - GAME shares written off as they withdraw from the LSE.

http://www.mcvuk.com...be-written-off/

It's not quite all over. There is still a chance that the sale of the overseas arm of Game may raise funds to repay shareholders at face value (normally the value of the shares when trading was suspended).

It's not looking good though.

[Monkeyboy]

You'll should also see giftcards reinstated in Game and Gamestation by the end of the week. Good news for all, don't throw those cards away yet.

Is this true? I got a Gamestation gift card for Christmas, but haven't spent it yet. Did Gamestation really stop accepting them whilst all this trouble with GAME has been going on? I haven't been in a games shop for about 4 months.

[Dudley]

Is this true? I got a Gamestation gift card for Christmas, but haven't spent it yet. Did Gamestation really stop accepting them whilst all this trouble with GAME has been going on? I haven't been in a games shop for about 4 months.

They legally had to stop accepting them as you were an unsecured creditor.

Whether they will accept them now depends entirely only whether the new owners believe the goodwill is worth the money, you lost all legal right to that money when they went into administration.

If people learn one thing from this it should be "Stop using fucking gift cards."

[Monkeyboy]

Well, if they don't accept it, I won't be darkening their doorstep until the end of time, let alone for another 4 months.

[hub223]

Quite. The vast majority of GAME head office comprises lots of people in areas like design, content, merchandising, loyalty, finance, loss prevention and a whopping huge department for customer service.

None of those guys will have any say in the decisions that stuffed GAME up. Hub's comments are ignorant and oversimplified to say the least. It wouldn't suprise me in the slightest if he'd ever worked in an office.

Ok, Ive worked in offices for years, I also worked for GAME for about 5 years, in the shop.

I can only post again what I've already said before, I used to have to deal with the sheer incompetence of the upper management on a day basis.

The things that got sent from head office into the shop would have been signed off from one of the department heads, like -

Price changes for p/o and new - example - new 39.99, p/o 37.98. Sale prices, normal price £39.99, "Sale" price £39.98. Also general prices changes would take all day, only to come in 2 or 3 days later and get told to change it back to what it was before, these would have been signed off by someone in upper management.

I can remember my manager try to get me to sell a p/o game for 2 bucks cheaper than the new one....I laughed at her, plus, she really couldn't understand why no one was buying the p/o games, because "they come with the same guarantee as the new ones"

Marketing changes on a weekly basis, I will give u a example of that, marketing used to come in on a Wednesday, it took two staff members all day to change it over (in a smallish shop, where I worked) only for my regional manager to send in his "version" of the marketing the very next day, which meant, you had to change 90% of the stuff that you just spend all of Wednesday changing. Also on Thursdays you had to deal with changing all of the hardware bundles over.

My manager used to get "100"% in her stock audit for the whole time that I was there, not one of the upper management in the LP department could figure out what she was up to. I don't care what anyone says, you cant get 100% in any audit, without fixing it.

You will be hard pushed to find anyone who used to work for GAME to say anything good about them.

I will try and be a bit clearer in future, when I say "head office staff", I mean upper managers.

[DjSatansfur3h]

I can remember my manager try to get me to sell a p/o game for 2 bucks cheaper than the new one....I laughed at her, plus, she really couldn't understand why no one was buying the p/o games, because "they come with the same guarantee as the new ones"

I didnt know GAME had stores in the U.S.? Unless your store was the first to accept payment in coffee?

[hub223]

Well I enjoyed working for EB - staff discount, the odd freebie, could take games home overnight - but again I worked there in 1999.

Believe it or not, I actually liked working in there, It was the people that I worked with that made made it good, however, the company itself, I wouldn't say a good word about them.

We got staff discount as well, about 30% I think, however, that did go down to 20 or 25% a couple of months before I left. Didn't get any freebies or to take games home for the night, they stopped that about 4 or 5 months after* I started.

However, my manager used to get the people who took the games home overnight to write a "review" about them, I know this cos the other staff members told me so, and that and the fact, if you were to work with her, would know it would be true as well.

EDIT - *Before*

[new member]

Whether they will accept them now depends entirely only whether the new owners believe the goodwill is worth the money, you lost all legal right to that money when they went into administration.

They will be accepted again.

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[Floshenbarnical]

Gamestation Salisbury is shut down. Walked past the empty shell today. It's a shame, I worked there for 3 years and most of the people who worked there when I did were still working there ... Genuinely hope they're finding work.

It'd be a different story if Haribo didn't quit!

[dayte]

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Dude, stop that

[Unofficial Who]

Well, Martyn Gibbs is back as the new CEO of GAME. Interesting times ahead.

Made me think of this.

I might be being too harsh here. Maybe consumers will come back round to bundles and pre-owned again!

Or maybe the new CEO will learn from previous experiences and work out a new strategy that will be more successful.

Edited April 3, 2012 by tssk