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Whither the Impulse Shopper?
An essay discussing the frustrations of the pre-order graces the pages of GameGirl Advance today. From the article: "I have had explained to me this morning, very pleasantly by an earnest young man, how there will be no PSPs available for drop-in customers on Thursday, and how, because of this, if I haven't pre-ordered, I won't be getting one for months, windfall tax refund or not."
Probably doesn't matter. We've all been through Sony launches before, we know the drill. They promise fewer units than people demand, they deliver fewer than they promise, stores weave gloom and doom about it taking months to restock and then two weeks later, we're all playing happily at home waiting until the inevitable disk read error or stuck button pops up to remind us why we told ourselves not to buy the next Sony system for at least three months after launch.
If there were no pre-orders the fanboys would just wait outside at opening and you'd have a half hour of chaos before they were all gone. Pre-orders actually allow the casual gamer to get a particular item they may happen to be looking forward to but not be able to line up pre-dawn like a Dead-head to get one. They're a good thing.
Video games only seem to sell out at video game stores on launch day. I've gotten those 3 titles on launch day (WoW CE even), a Nintendo DS, and various other games/system dating back a good 9 or so years without preordering, ever.
I remember the first time I encountered the idea of preordering. I went to my local EB to pick up a copy of Fighter Maker for the PS (yes, crapfest, I know). They had several copies in the case behind the counter, but wouldnt sell one to me because I didn't preorder. It was rather late in the day, clearly those copies were going to sit there all night, but their only response was to come back tomorrow and buy it. How they could pass up an easy sale on a non-so-hot game suprised me, but they wouldn't budge. In the end, I walked 3 stores down and purchased a copy at a KB Toystore, no preordering, no coming back tomorrow.
My advice to everyone is do yourselves a favor and use EB, Gamestop, and the like for older/used games only. Your local Wal-mart or other retail chain will probably meet all your release day needs, whithout you lining their pockets with your hard-earned money before you can even get what you want.
What does this woman want?
1. An item is in HUGE demand
2. People pay extra to secure an item without having to queue from 3am
3. Game retailer makes more money and provides a service gladly taken advantage of by the customer
4. Customer can look forward to a happy day
It works
If you want something hard to get, you have to play the game. So to speak.
Wait a few months. There are many, many good titles out there that you've never played and that you can pick up cheaply at EB or GameStop.
Enjoy those for a while. Eventually, your title will either fall in price (Beyond Good and Evil, most PC titles) or will be rereleased as a Greatest Hit / "value" title (most of the bigger console titles).
Trust me...it works well. Especially on the slight chance that you recognize this screen name from one of the other sites that I frequent. ;)
Goo goo g'joob.
Guess what folks? Reserves exist for two reasons:
1) To help the company. In scenarios like Halo 2 they really don't - a lot of stores still have literally hundreds of Halo 2 reserves not picked up, from years before the release. But many stores had almost all their GTAs or their Splinter Cells go the first day. Stocking games - and game systems - is fucking EXPENSIVE. This is why UPS and FedEx are such a big deal now - it's cheaper to hold things in one place and send them where they need to go when they're needed.
2) Yes, to help the customer. You know those HUGE 300+ person lines you see someone posting for every fucking game in Japan? This is because reserving is a relatively new thing there. Reserving DOES make your life easier.
Now, some people do things the wrong way - I've never held back a game from a customer or anything like that, and I'm in a management position in one of the US's two big game specialty stores. In fact I've never known of anyone being told to do this - it would probably be considered "padding your numbers" and get someone fired.
It could be worse - we could be selling you a credit card or something.
--Moo.
If you read the sunday flyers, BestBuy is opening their store extra early on Thursday. This whole create-demand by cutting supply concept is getting played out. Stores are so afraid to have even 1 extra inventory nowadays it's scary.