Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'm curious, which store is the author trying to buy the PSP from?
I worked at EB for a few years and this is the way their business model is setup. Someone decides/predicts how well a game or product will sell and order a certain number of them for each store. If a game does not have alot of buzz around it, then they'll usually only order 1 or 2 copies for each store, if that many... The preorder system works somewhat independant of this, and any games preordered are guarenteed to come in...blah,blah,blahh... I'm sure you've heard the shpeel before. Anyway, if a great game comes out yet no one pre-orders it and there's not a whole lot of buzz for it, they'll only bring in one copy usually, and because of this it sells poorly and it's a downward spiral/vicious cycle from there. As for extremely popular stuff, because there are limited quantities they require a pre-order so the stores that have more customers wanting one will get one, which actually makes sense...but most shoppers are unaware of this system and get screwed like the guy who submitted this article...
"A truly wise man realizes he knows nothing."
Go to Best Buy, Circuit City, Wal-Mart, or Target (or a similar store). You'll be able to fine one without a problem.
"Moderate drinking can help prevent amputated limbs" -- Abigail Zuger, NYTimes, 12/31/02
Software is differnt. I don't remember any games since the Sega Genesis, Super Nintendo days being in short supply. Hardware is a differnt matter all together. There is only a finite set of processor chips and what not to make. Any company can stamp out a CD/DVD game relativly fast.
-Dipster
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.
Games are still a somewhat risky business.
If you live in a town of a modest size, unless it's a HUGE title (ie a Halo, FF, Zelda, etc.), stores aren't going to stock dozens of copies on the launch day. Even guessing how many copies a "big" game will sell is risky business. Just ask any local game store how many CASES of Crystal Chronicles they still have in stock.
PSP shipments are going to be light at first, and if a store takes preorders, those are taken away from walk-ins on launch. So your choices are to either preorder, or try your luck at a store that doesn't take orders, and hope you get one.
If you don't like it, shop elsewhere. But don't be surprised when your local WalMart only has 15 PSPs on launch, half of them sold before the street date, and the other half snapped up by someone to put on Ebay.
I'm fucking tired of hearing my friends whine about how they have to wait a week to get game "X" simply because they were too lazy to pony up $5. You'd think people would've learned their lesson from the PS2 launch...
With software, it's not a matter of "Man, when will I ever be able to get it," it's more of a "Will I be able to get it when I want it," kind of thing. Particularly on launch days or days following launches, a lot of people find themselves "running around" to find that game they'd been waiting for.
Sounds like someone was turned down as a date recently.
Would you kindly mod me +1 insightful?
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.
I hear there's plenty of N-Gage's available right now, and you don't even have to pre-order. Hurry for supply and demand!
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.
I don't know about anyone else, but whenever I pre-order something its usually at most 3 days before the item's launch. Always seems to work for me.
disclaimer: I've been known to store numbers in my ass for which to dig out when quantities are required.
First, you made a number of dumb assumptions in your third paragraph. Second, I guess assumptions are all you have to run on since you admitted you "have no idea what a 'PSP' is". And third, this is Slashdot: Games, not Slashdot: Finances--to reply accordingly would be to address the article's issues of game stores punishing impulse shoppers by requiring likely unneccesary pre-ordering. Only by posting the first chapter of your novella, or mashing your keyboard with your face, could you have replied less accordingly.
And since we're on topic (or at least, while one of us is), you might want to check out these games yourself. I have heard it argued that Grand Theft Auto (a videogame of some sort) would be a perfect arena for your misogyny.
I read Slashdot for the articles.
I've always liked the way Gamestop handles pre-orders (or at least the Gamestop I usually go to, not sure if they all have the same policy). Basically, although you have to put money down to pre-order a game, you are welcome to put down as much or as little as you want, and whatever you put down is taken off the price when you pick up the game. If for some reason they are unable to get enough copies of the game to fill all the pre-orders, then people who put down the most on the game get theirs first. ,$foo, in-stock, you can pick it up starting tomorrow at 10 am. Usually I'm up-to-date on release dates, but occasionally it's a nice suprise, since I've already paid for the game I can go pick it up without worrying about my current financial situation.
What I like about this system is that when I hear about a new game that I'm really excited about, I can go and pay for the entire thing, and then forget about it, and the day before the game is released I get a call saying "we have your game,
Whenever there is a thread about pre-orders, people always mention just waiting until there are more copies and the price drop, but I generally like to get a game soon after it's release just because (except during the holidays) the good games worth playing are spaced out so that generally by the time one comes out, I've finished the last great game and probably played through a couple of mediocre bargin-bin titles.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
EB, GameStop, etc, all crave money on their used ("preowned") stuff to the detriment of the new stuff. If they could, as a chain, still be respected for knowing games if they didn't carry new games, they probably would. New games are there so they can get you to buy the strategy guide (200% markup!), etc.
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
" 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."
A.) They want people to pre-order. The value of pre-ordering diminishes if it's a flip of the coin whether you'll get it or not just because you can't get there by 6pm.
B.) They had probably already taken money for it. Not every place has that policy, but some do.
c.) Customer service people don't like unhappy customers.
"Derp de derp."
Gee, do you think choking off supply translates into lost sales somehow ? The funniest/saddest thing is, artifical scarcity actually does seem to influence some peoples' perceptions of a product.
In Soviet America the banks rob you!
PlayStation Portable or somesuch, it's Sony's new foray into the portable gaming biz (aimed directly at the Nintendo DS, with better gfx, but a single screen, and quite possibly significantly lower battery time).
I've always had terrible luck with pre-orders. Back when I worked at Gamestop, it seemed like everytime I pre-ordered a game, we wouldn't get enough copies in, and the policy was that employees couldn't get their games unless there were enough for all the customers that preordered. Usually, the reason we wouldn't get enough copies is because we'ld take preorders the night before the game was supposed to arrive. No one else could figure out that the preorders had probably already been shipped so you can't add more to them.
Since then, I've managed to preorder a game at a store that got the game 3 days after every other store, and a store that decided to sell the game at $5 more than every other store. Oh, I also preordered Enter the Matrix and Final Fantasy X-2. Yeah, I'm really not a fan of preordering anymore.
"What is Internet Explorer 7? Are you saying we can't access the normal internet?" - I love tech support. Really.
She's bitching that there won't be enough PSPs for everyone. Congratulations. We've known this since NOVEMBER! They delayed the European launch just to have more here.
And don't harp on the 48 hour limit like it's the end of the world. They still have your money when you finally do get it. That isn't going anywhere.
Face the facts, girly, the only reason a PSP won't be available for pickup at the store that day for you is because enough people saw fit to show they want one more than you do. If you can't handle that, then shop elsewhere. Many stores don't do reservations, so you can camp out if you like.
I manage an video game store, and for one I believe that the preorder system is necessary. It does need some work, but it IS necessary. As it stands right now, the presell system is set up as a bargaining chip to use with vendors for product allocation. It's like the stock market, either you invest in it and the industry flourishes, or you ignore it and it crashes.
When talking preorders, systems are a bit of an anomaly. There's hardly enough supply to cover the demand, and I'm already presold halfway into my second shipment of PSP systems. With systems, you not only need presells on the systems but on the games themselves. In the case of the PSP, Sony communicates this policy to our buyers: The more systems we sell that also contain first-party accessories/games, the more allocation our company is guaranteed when it comes time to purchasing more systems. I don't get it (or much of it) if no one preorders it, so if I'm not selling any copies of Ridge Racer with those PSPs I'm pretty much guaranteeing a shortage in my area, because Sony will sell the systems I could have had to another company.
See, I have no control whatsoever on what comes into my store aside from whatever I can muster from preorders, or from store transfers AFTER the product releases (the latter which cuts into my bottom dollar from shipping costs). Preorders affect product allocation, and if I can't get any preorders I'm probably getting one or two... sometimes none. I didn't get a single copy of Alien Hominid or Painkiller: Battle out of Hell because no one preordered it. However, I had a few reserves for MVP Baseball 2005, so I got my reserves plus a few extra because the company saw that there was demand for it at my store. Because those people preordered it, I had a few to sell to walk-ins. I've learned something since then, and it's that a smart manager will have three or four $5 presells which will float around towards presells on various obscure but sure-to-be-popular titles (Katamari Damacy, any Nippon Ichi title, etc) just to get at least one in the store. I guarantee that it's something I do now, and it works. In short, preordering doesn't only help yourself, it helps out impulse shoppers as well because stores get extras if they get a lot of reserves.
(From the Laws of Japanese Animation) Law of Inherent Combustibility -- Everything explodes. Everything.
1. Sony would not ship anywhere near the numbers they said they would, and even if they did, 1 Million wouldn't be enough.
2. The only way to get one guarenteed is to pre order it, back before feb 24, in my particular area - the day the preordeers filled at all the shops I usually visit.
And last of all, 3. If you want to face the screaming masses at Wal-Mart, Be my guest. PSP's will be extorted on ebay Thurs Afternoon, and 100% profit is enough to bring out the crazies.
Or did you think we should have saved some units for the casual gamer, and made a special line so you wouldn't have to wait, like the rest of us??
Physics is nothing like religion. If it was, we'd have an easier time trying to raise money!
You don't actually have to stay in them -- thats just shops in Tokyo's Akihabara district, where some sort of nerdon particles emantating from the dense collection of electronics draws geeks like moths to a flame. Its like lining up for Star Wars -- standing in the line is a chance to hang out with your buddies, meet people, and generally express your geekhood. Japan is king of the "rediculous redundancy in distribution" game, which means rather than going to one of the big super-stores you can travel to one of the *seven* one room video game stores within *two blocks* of a *station in a city with less than 50,000 people*. Half of the reason prices are so bad is that the distribution cost is just stupidly irrational, but on the plus side if a store goes out of stock on a popular item they'll have more in the morning and if you can't wait that long its a two-block walk to the next store to check (or a $2 train ticket to the next decently sized town, and check the store which is invariably 100 feet from the train station.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
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).
Tell that to anybody who has tried to buy Rez (for PS2) or Phantasy Star Online (for GameCube). Those titles can fetch $50+ used on eBay.
Sell people what they want to buy. It's funny how it works out. When GT4 came out a few weeks ago I stopped by my local Gamespot, only to be told, that they had "none at all", with a smirk, even though I could see dozens in a box behind the counter. Well, OK, I said. Went to EB Games, asked if they had any, the salesperson asked if I preordered - "Nope." - funny, he still gave me a game. So he obviously wasn't worried about some irate customer coming in and not getting the game they preordered - this must be some sort of new, crazy marketing scheme - letting people give you money for a product instead of telling them no. I remember reading somewhere that the whole preorder thing is a total scam run by the stores to get a hold of money to drop into MMA's and the like. Anyone have any facts on that?
Sanford May, the person who wrote the entry linked in this story, is a MAN.
I humbly suggest you all stop calling him a bitch and comparing him to your annoying girlfriend. Thanks.