GameStop Offers $50 Certificate For Coupon Fiasco

First time accepted submitter milbournosphere writes "It appears that GameStop has a guilty conscience. They are offering a $50 gift certificate to any person who bought the new Deus Ex at GameStop. You may recall that GameStop has admitted to removing the OnLive codes good for one free game from new, unopened copies of the game. From GameStop's email: 'For your inconvenience, we would like to offer you a free $50 GameStop gift card and a Buy 2 Get 1 Free pre-owned purchase. We want to earn back your trust and confidence in the GameStop experience. Please bring in this email and your store receipt or order confirmation from GameStop.com and present it to a Game Advisor.'"

Comments

Corporate humility at its best

[richdun]

Please humbly accept our apologies. To make this better, we'd like to offer you the chance to buy more stuff from us.

Re:Corporate humility at its best

[Samantha Wright]

In another leaked memo, it was found that GameStop had instructed employees to deny that this "was part of the plan all along."

Re:Corporate humility at its best

[Pharmboy]

In all fairness, what they are offering sounds much better than the coupon they took out. Unlike the Sony asshats that offered a free month (zero cost to themselves) for unleashing your credit card data all over the net.

IMHO, this seems like a fair deal and an honest attempt to correct a mistake. After all, no one bought the game originally just to get the coupon, so most of the purchasers are getting way more than they paid for.

And...... of course it is a coupon for their own company, plus BOGO offer on used. The people who missed out on the coupon were *already customers*, so it isn't like the $50 will go to waste. In this instance, it seems like they really are trying to fix a mistake.

Re:Corporate humility at its best

[kamapuaa]

Who buys? That business model is dead and gone. Much cheaper just to download off a bittorrent site.

Re:Corporate humility at its best

[Hijacked Public]

It wasn't a mistake, it was a purposeful altering of a product prior to selling it as 'new' without telling anyone.

The claim is that they didn't want to sell what is essentially a coupon for a competitor's store, and I don't blame them, but they could very well have been up front about that prior to the sale and included this 'deal' in its place then instead of now.

It is annoying to me and I don't even game.

Re:Corporate humility at its best

[FatdogHaiku]

In this instance, it seems like they really are trying to fix a mistake.

If they wanted to "fix" the mistake they could pay for OnLive service for anyone that was deprived of the experience by this unethical practice. Anything else is just blowing smoke up the customers asses.

Re:Corporate humility at its best

[f()rK()_Bomb]

i buy stuff from steam every week pretty much in their sales as do my friends. games are just overpriced, that's the real reason people download them. I won't buy deus ex till it's half price for example. online stores allow you to easily expolit the long tail effect since you don't need to keep stock on shelves.

Re:Corporate humility at its best

[PopeScott]

IMHO what they should have done PRIOR to this whole batch of idiocy: Accept the coupon themselves. Just like many grocers have been doing for years for their competitors coupons.
Corporate short sightedness strikes again.

Re:Corporate humility at its best

[hairyfeet]

Uhhh...because many of us, in fact I would argue soon ALL of us, have data caps? I'm all for buying online but the fabled "download anytime model" is gonna die hard. Kinda hard to "shop from your lounge chair" and download it if it is gonna cost you $1.50 per Gb if you go over. And if anything thanks to Amazon my family buys more dead tree databases than ever before. With Amazon I can just slap some money in my account and let mom go to town. I do the same for my boys for games, and myself for games and musical equipment.

So I'd say buying dead tree and plastic is alive and well, it is GameSlop douchebaggery that is dying out. You treat your customers right you'll have plenty of business. but TFA shows GameSlop simply doesn't understand that concept.

Re:Corporate humility at its best

[Sinthet]

They did it on purpose, definitely, but it was a mistake to do it at all. The $50 dollars definitely covers the cost of the coupon, and the buy 2 get one free deal also results in "free" stuff to the customer. I think Gamestop is being fair here: They're giving the customer back what they took (arguably more, a coupon can only be used to redeem one specific game that they already had, they can get anything with this gift card), and extending a special offer to those they screwed over.

At the very least, they listened to complaints and admitted their mistake. In the corporate world, this is rare, but it shouldn't be rare. Gamestop just gained a point or two in my book.

Re:Corporate humility at its best

[Pharmboy]

Several other have already articulated why this *was* a mistake, and it certainly was. What matters most is that they admitted it was a mistake, and instead of punting the blame, or being miserly in dealing with it, they put their money where their mouth was and instantly stopped the practice AND compensated everyone who was affected with something that was worth much more than the original coupon, arguably twice the value since the coupon was good for any game, plus the buy1/get1 on used, any used.

Companies are going to screw up from time to time, there is no way around that. What makes them a good company or a bad one is if they admit a mistake, and how they compensate for the mistake. In this instance, I think they were very fair, and it would appear that many people agree with that assessment.

Friends

[Anonymous Coward]

Friends don't let friends buy from GameStop.

They've done this for years

[Jim Hall]

I haven't bought new from GameStop in years because of their general practice of lending new copies of games to employees and then later selling those games as new. Last time I tried to buy a new game from them, it looked like this guy's game, so I just walked away without buying. Now I only buy new from my local Target store, or online from Amazon.

I still go to GameStop to buy and sell used games, though.

Re:they're afraid of OnLive?

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe once you reach puberty, your vocabulary will expand to include other adjectives than "gay". For example, I would not use "gay" to describe you - more like, you are a retarded moron.

Re:hmph. typical

[MightyMartian]

"Why yes sir, the rotting banana peel and a mummified female index finger were part of the original packaging."

Re:Uh No Thanks

[D'Sphitz]

If this were a class action settlement the coupon would be good for $3 while the lawyers would take their $47 in cash.

Re:Why was parent modded troll?

[sorak]

I am a firm believer that, if I try to take X from someone, and get caught, I need to do far more than "return X". It's not about revenge, but about making this kind of behavior unprofitable enough so that the losses exceed the gains. I didn't buy the game, but if I bought something there, and didn't get EXACTLY what I paid for, including the game, the box, the manual,. and everything else that the manufacturer had wanted me, the customer, to have, then I would feel that they had cheated me.

"X plus a coupon" is a start, but it doesn't fix everything.

I believe that qualifies as a mistake.

[intellitech]

It wasn't a mistake, it was a purposeful altering of a product prior to selling it as 'new' without telling anyone.

I believe that qualifies as a mistake. Not an accident, but a mistake.

Re:Uh No Thanks

[sjames]

To be fair, it's not a $50 off on a purchase, it's a gift card. In a class action suit, you'd have to spend $150 in order to take advantage of the $50.

I have no idea what the original OnLive code was worth, but the gift card is genuinely better than a dollars off coupon.

Gamestop's Side

[Anonymous Coward]

I did not see many people taking Gamestop's side in all this. From their point of view publishers have been trying to ruin their business for a long time now. First they debate the legality of second hand sales. Then they begin offering their own distribution methods. Now they are specifically advertising for a competing market but using the old one that got them rich in the first place.

Re:Gamestop's Side

[Grave]

GameStop's core product is used games, which they are massively better at selling than anyone else. You can complain about pricing if you like, but they move huge volumes of used games. Think it's not worth it to buy a used copy for only $5 less than new? That might be true of you, but whenever a big title is released like Call of Duty, those used copies are often sold before they even get put out on the shelves. GameStop only sells PC games at all to avoid upsetting publishers - the money earned from the square footage spent on PC games is, in many stores, not worth it compared to console formats.

Was it incredibly stupid to yank the OnLive coupon? Yes. Was that coupon really worth $50? That's a personal decision. I don't feel that it was--all it provided was a different medium to play the same game, whereas with this gift card you can get a different game.

Corporate naming b.s.

[MickyTheIdiot]

Does anyone else throw up in their mouth a little bit when they read a corporate euphemism for "store clerk" like "game advisor"?

Re:they're afraid of OnLive?

[MickyTheIdiot]

do you think they bother to Shill slashdot when half the posts will always be about the lack of a linux client.

Trust? Hardly.

[Alzheimers]

"We want to earn back your trust and confidence in the GameStop experience."

Sorry guys, you lost that when you sold me a copy of Sins of a Solar Empire without a disc in the case.

That was before I "trusted" digital downloads. Because of that, now it's the physical stores I don't trust. Ironic.