How much longer can retail outlets hold on in the gaming industry?

Some of my favorite gaming memories come from when I was a kid and I would run down to the local department store with some money from the teenage jobs that I had and I didn't really even have any idea what I was going to buy for a new game.

We didn't have internet back then and while we did do a bunch of research as far as magazines were concerned, our exposure to a wide array of games was pretty limited especially since we were at the whim of the stores as far as what they were going to stock.

I recall one day walking into a store that I don't think exists anymore called Montgomery Ward's and they had a display case and there was a meager 12 games or so inside of it. Thankfully one of those games ended up being Final Fantasy 2 or 3 - not sure which - and it ended up being one of my favorite games of all time.

Later in life, even when I was in college I would head to the Toys 'R Us and peruse the aisles and peek through hundreds of game choices. They had what I considered to be a really good system at that time in that there was no threat of theft because the physical games were not even out there, you would just take a ticket to the counter and they would retrieve the game from "the back."

src

These days, retail outlets are hanging on by a thread and I would imagine that it is only a matter of time before they disappear altogether - which is a real shame in my mind but the industry has kind of moved on to online only purchases.

While I prefer physical copies of the games I play, I can understand why they would do this because there are less costs involved on the manufacturer's part, the stock never runs out, and we can continue to sit on our fat asses shopping in the PS Store or whatever the X-box store is called. I don't know about one. I haven't owned a MS system since the first Xbox.

src

I still really like Game Stop, which is the only video-game specific store that remains in my area but their days are numbered since new-age systems for the most part, don't require a physical copy of a game at all. Some of the new systems don't even have a disk drive so what are you going to buy at the store?

The last time that I went into Game Stop it was mostly Nintendo-centric because those games are still physical in nature if you want them to be. Other than that, the store was mostly filled with older systems and collectibles. So I guess they are doing as best they can but this isn't enough.

In a way it is kind of shitty because there is no longer a market for 2nd hand games, which might have been the objective of the console manufacturers in the first place. Used games were always a lot of fun to me because I am not an early adopter of games for the most part and I used to love being able to go in there and buy 3 or 4 games for the price of one - even if they were older titles.

Now I don't even think that is possible anymore.

More and more of my friends are moving to pirate systems where the software is intentionally not uploaded and they can just get any game that they want from various torrent sites. I don't like this idea but the industry is basically doing it to themselves. In my mind you can let us have used games or games borrowed from a friend for 40 years then all of a sudden cut that avenue off and not expect some sort of blowback from the gamers.

I read that Game Stop closed more than 300 stores in 2019 and we can expect this to continue down the same road that Blockbuster Video did in the 90's and early 2000's. It is simply a dying industry and Game Stop announced in late 2020 that they plan to close 1000 more stores. I don't know if this actually happened but I reckon it did.

src

I recently read that nearly half of all of Game Stop's revenue came from trade-in's and reselling of used merch, and like I said before, unless you are still gaming on a PS3 or a Dreamcast or something like that, this is no longer an option.

Game Stop briefly tried to offer digital incentives to shop in a physical store including better deals than were available in the various digital stores as well as customer loyalty programs and for a time it was working to a certain degree but then Sony went and pulled all digital merchandise from their shops, which was a huge blow to them.

I will miss shopping in person because it was a big part of my youth but I guess times move on and the next generation of gamers likely wont even know that anyone EVER bought physical copies of games.

It's tragic, but inevitable. Game Stop and other retail outlets better do a complete overhaul of their business model soon or they are just delaying the end which I think will happen in the next couple of years.