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Death of the Indie Game Store
tjmcgee writes "Independent game stores are usually hard to find, and when you do they are generally overpriced. An article on the Next-Gen site explains why the independent game store is all but gone. The article is very funny but kinda sad." From the article: "There's a lot of competition out there. There's no getting around it. Everyone is selling games now. Chances are your grandmother is hocking copies of Vice City every Monday between Bingo and Salisbury Steak night at the Shady Tree rest home."
Independent game stores are usually hard to find, and when you do they are generally overpriced.
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WAL-MART SELLS FOR CHEAPER
The days of mom and pop shops of almost any kind are gone. The Internet has killed profit margins. Forget service and anything else. The bottom line is who's got it the cheapest. Kind of sad, really.
Indie games are alive and well on the macintosh, I doubt that I have any mainstream games on my computer.
Second, you imply that these 'fundamentals' are inevitable. It is no surprise that large corporations can use their buying power to leverage prices and lower costs below that of independant sellers, but as stewards of our economic model is this what we really want? Do we want a handful of large retail stores with similar strategies to each other to be the gatekeepers of what stuff we see and what stuff we don't? Do we want retailers with huge purchasing power to force producers to adopt lowest cost production techniques? Or perhaps there are factors which are important to people that don't get expressed well in the marketplace. Perhaps different ways of conducting business need to be given advantages and disadvantages based on long term economic health and not just the aggregate narrow-focus decisions of many people.
It's not the price issue that finished off independent games stores; it's the fact that the owners generally just didn't understand their role in the market.
I used to know some pretty decent indie games shops here in the UK. All but one of them have now either closed, or have become so dire that in any just world they would be closed. Go back 4 years or so and maybe a third of my games purchases were from independent stores. I've only bought a single one in the last year (compared to about 20 purchases from major chains).
So why? I don't think it's at all fair to blame the big chains or the games industry for this; by and large, they have a role and they do it well. If you want to buy a major title, or indeed any release from the last 12 months or so, you go to a big chain store. You'll get the same game here for less money, as they can take advantage of economies of scale.
What indie stores used to do was offer a range of imported, obscure or simply older titles that wouldn't get shelf-space in the big chains. Sure, you'd pay a fair whack for picking up a US import, but it generally wasn't much more expensive than importing it yourself, plus you didn't have all the associated worries about imbecillic courier firms and zealous customs agents. Plus, it's just... nice... to be able to walk into a shop and buy what you want right there and then.
This all changed, of course. Most of the indie games stores seemed to start worrying that they were so much more expensive than the big chains. They started to try competing directly with them, buying large quantities of the latest AAA franchise titles at the exclusion of the lesser known stuff and lowering their prices. This was always bound to fail; no matter how low they went, the big chains were always going to be able to go lower. Hence, most of them went bust.
Capitalism is a great thing, contrary to what you often read on slashdot. However, it's also frequently misunderstood. To succeed in a modern capitalist economy, you do not always need to try to compete directly with the biggest fish around. You just have to be able to stake out a niche of your own and defend it. The major chains have never tried to offer the products that I used to be able to get in the indies. Hence, I can only conclude that most indie store owners either panicked unnecessarily or got too greedy.
I'm a steward of my bank account. A copy of WoW is no different from one retailer to another and I'll buy it where I can get it the cheapest and with the least hassle. If this means I order online from Amazon rather than travel halfway across town to stick some money in some over-grown kid's hand, that's fine with me.
There simply isn't a need for smaller videogame retail stores, except for used or vintage items.
Do you shop at the family-owned korean convenience store down the street for your groceries, even though a can of chili is $3.75? Or do you travel further to go to a Safeway or Cub Foods where you can buy it for 80 cents?
Once upon a time, those kinds of specialty stores existed. You'd go to a battery store, and thats what they did: sold batteries. Of all sizes and kinds. If it wasn't there, it didn't exist. Now, you go to Wal-Mart, and if your battery isn't there, it doesn't exist anymore. If Wal-Mart says it won't carry X, then X's maker usually goes out of business or makes whatever changes are necessary to keep Wal-Mart.
Retailers hold a huge power over both ends of the market... consumers are slowly being forced into the big retailers' clutches as the specialty stores (like the electronics stores that actually carried 220:15 step downs for the 2 or 3 people that built equipment for use in Europe in the US) went out of business. With dwindling outlets for their goods, producers are being forced to court the last of the retailers just to get their product to market.
The internet could have solved all of this, but with behemoths like Amazon on the scene, the same act is playing out again.
In general I get this "death of the small retailer" thing, its an argument thats been around across all retailing as long as I can remember. Probably before I was born given the long standing existence of super markets.
But for video games, I don't see what an independent retailer offers. Its different for say, butchers vs. supermarket slop (its about sourcing) or bookshops and recordshops (indie retailers buy from indie niche publishers). But for video games, the indie studios hardly exist any more much less indie game publishers. Its not even like a hardware store/butcher/fish munger etc. where the product is generic but one is happy to pay a modest premium for expertise and advice of the owner. In the early days (early to mid 1980s) this was probably the case with computer software but not anymore.
Video games are the same wherever you get them and the inventory just isn't that diverse and the bigger names probably stock more because they can afford the shelf space. Its sad for people directly involved but as a consumer it leaves me a little cold to be honest.
Plays violent online games as: Nerfherder76
PC gaming is an expensive hobby.
Yes yes, you can run all the latest games on a $100 video card, blah blah, but just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
My point - I don't think there are many casual PC gamers.
I've been in a lot of towns and smaller citys, both before and after they get a Wal-Mart Superstore. The empty store fronts are painfully obvious after the W-M SS has been in town for about 2 years.