The Impact The Internet Had Upon British Game Stores

CGUK:
'Until the birth of the internet traditional brick and mortar games stores reigned supreme in the whereabouts of a gamer's venue of business.Game, Gamestation, HMV and Blockbuster are all examples of corporations that once saw national daily visitor numbers in excess of 1,000,000. However, things have changed, and not necessarily for the best

[mike32UK]

When I can find the same game on Amazon for £15 cheaper, is there any reason to use these stores?

[iistuii]

Although I agree it's great getting games cheaper online, just imagine for a moment if EVERY store decided to get a warehouse & sell from it. All those jobs. Town centers all over the UK are being turned into charity shops. But the shops like Game don't help themselves with the crap trade in prices & over priced new & second hand games. I'm sure they could charge less & still beable to exist, greedy...

[liquidhalos]

We're consumers, we shop for value and not "what if". The high street needs to evolve or its going to vanish, that evolution shouldn't mean I pay more when I could save money online. No way.

[Vitalogy]

@iistuii You said: "just imagine for a moment if EVERY store decided to get a warehouse & sell from it. All those jobs."

You do know that warehouses don't run for themselvs right? People will always be needed to do stuff like packing orders and so on and a warehouse might even employee more people than a street store.

[iistuii]

Yeah they don't run themselves, but have you seen how Amazon employees are treated. They are on minimun wage & are running all over the place to push out orders. There was a documentary programme on tv about it a couple of weeks ago. I'm not for one moment agreeing to pay extra for goods, I for one get all my games online, I'm just stating that businesses everywhere are closing. But like the other bloke says, the high street needs to re invent themselves to survive.

[xer0]

I went into a game store today, for a Dualshock 4 controller. And the treatment I got by the staff, didn't want me to go back. Ever.

[skulz7]

The weird thing about Game is that their website is a lot cheaper than the prices in store. I have once Pre ordered a game from the website and it was almost 10 pounds cheaper than the store price and it came a day early.

I used to love going to video game shops and getting a game on the day but their prices are just ridiculous.

[DasTier]

To be fair I recently realised that my local game actually was selling some new games for about £10 cheaper than Amazon.

[lnfiniteLoop]

GAME has more exclusive content and charge for the privilege, instead of using it as a insentive to purchase from them instead of other retailers... as for myself I prefer to save £5 - £15 on a title than have a few extra bits of DLC... so I will always only compare prices with GAME and in most cases buy elsewhere (in particular online)...

think I have bought only 2 titles from GAME in as many years... I just find it cheaper (online mainly) elsewhere... in our town we have two GAME Stores within 400yrds of each other and a CEX 150yrds of one of them...

[liquidhalos]

It's like that in Cheltenham, we have 1 game store on the high street, then around the corner there's an independent game shop and a cex and a second independent game shop about 100 yards on from that. Not to mention asda, tesco, Morrisons and sainsbury. All of which tend to offer better deals on big AAA titles than game. I've also never been much of a fan of game employees, they do tend to talk nonsense on occasion in order to make sales which I strongly disagree with. My personal favourite when wanting to buy call of juarez 2 was. "you don't want that game mate, you want red dead redemption because they used horses on treadmills to get the animation right."

[Angrymorgan]

Unfortunately its having an effect on every town centre and high street.
its not just gaming but also clothing shops too.
I live 2 mins walk away from my town centre and its a shadow of its former self. All thats there now is charity shops, takeaways and the odd bakery.
also pubs are shutting left right and centre, the cost of living is on the up.......happy days...sigh

[Immorals]

It's the government killing the pubs, with the smoking ban and large taxes :(

[DualWielding]

I feel bad for people losing their jobs, but I still won't pay more for buying physically when I could pay less to buy online, and I doubt anybody will

[Bennibop]

Game station was always more competitive than game, it was unfortunate game bought them out. CEX is still fairly good though.

[pompombrum]

I find it ironic these sort of stories are coming out, 15ish years ago, we were talking about how big companies like GAME were taking over and destroying local gaming businesses.