Of course they sold out. They were a low-quantity, loss leader gimmick to get you to line up outside their store at the ass-crack of dawn.
This sounds more like a "we're going to start playing dirty now too" announcement to me. I'd expect to see Sony bet the farm on buying HD-DVD out of the market. How can they possibly afford to lose?
As far as I'm aware, "fair credit" comes in the form of a paycheck. Everything else is just gravy.
"Nobody" watches the credits of a video game. Really I don't see any reason for them to be there at all. It only causes problems like this, and doesn't actually accomplish anything other than ego stroking.
The more they take content and put it into instances, both pve and pvp; the more it becomes a pointless game to play. Why play a Mmorpg which has turned into an Orpg? Does it matter that there can be 2k people on your server when you only ever see a dozen or so every night because the game is all instanced?
Eh, it's either that or you're competing with a few thousand other people for spawns to complete the same quest objectives.
Really the only reason the game is MMO is so they can charge you a monthly fee. All the content can be divided up between "moderately multi-player" (between 5 & 80 people), and "you wish this was single player". The online functionality in WoW is essentially a regression from optimal (which they hit with Diablo 2). It's still a good game though. Worth playing a character through the level climb at least once for each faction.
But the guy completely missed the most needed reform of all: Sanity to copyright lengths. IINM at the beginning of the 20th century it was twenty years. That sounds about right; you're not going to pursuade Jimi Hendrix to do any more recording!
I think copyright terms should be unlimited... sortof.
They should expire every 7 years, but with infinite renewals. For each renewal, the fee should increase exponentially.
This would accomplish several things. It would give a clear legal path to the use of orphaned works, it would force holders to assess the value of the work against the fee, thus causing more works to enter the public domain sooner, and for the companies that choose to maintain their copyrights for extreme periods, it would likely create a need for additional creative input to generate sufficient revenue to justify the high renewal fee.
As for Technological Restrictions, notice is not enough. Technological restrictions should be required to expire with the copyright, and allow fair use in order to qualify for protection under the DMCA at the very least. They should probably be completely illegal if they don't make those provisions.
Given the following assumptions, your strategy can not possibly make a profit.
1. The only time they need to sell a gutted game is when they are out of shrink wrapped, new copies. 2. Shipping empty boxes requires excluding an actual game from current shipments.
With these conditions, the gutted game wouldn't even be there to purchase under your system. We must assume #2, because it doesn't make sense to ship a box of empty boxes, as there aren't enough games coming out on a given week to warrant that.
Your assumption #2 is absurd.
For PC games, empty boxes could be shipped folded up. They certainly wouldn't take any more space than the other enormous cardboard promotional materials that get sent for a game.
For console games, they could just ship a label to insert into an empty, appropriately colored DVD case.
This kind of market existed in the Atari days, and when Nintendo first attempted to rejuvenate the video games industry. However, due to the mechanics of this it was nearly impossible for a video game company to make a profit. Books and video games are simply not interchangeable.
I don't know if you've noticed, but expensive cartridges have been replaced with dirt-cheap optical media. It used to cost orders of magnitudes more to "print" a video game compared to a book, and now it costs at least one order of magnitude less.
You anecdote would be more helpful if A) you specified when this happened B) you specified with what titles and C) you specified what GameStop tried to do to appease you, however unsuccessful it was. As it stands, it's entirely your experience against the experience of anyone who disagrees.
We're going in circles here. I don't need to give you an anecdotal example, because *all* GameStops were taking pre-orders for the items I listed in this post before the release dates and/or prices of the items were announced.
But, you need to be very muscular for it to tag you as obese.
You don't need to be very muscular at all for it to tag you as "overweight" though.
I find it amusing that I've maintained approximately the same BMI between the ages of 20-30 even though a large percentage of my mass has moved from my chest and shoulders down to my waist.
Clearly I was much healthier from a body-fat perspective 5 years ago than I am now, but as far as government statistics and life-insurance companies are concerned nothing has changed.
Incidentally, there's a reason that GameStop doesn't pressure publishers to use the book publishing model instead of the pre-order model that they currently use:
The inability to return unsold games to the publisher makes it impossible for an independent video games store to turn a profit. By abusing their customers with the pre-order policy, they are able to ensure that competition is economically unfeasible. That way you continue to shop there even though they abuse you. Nice, huh? They actually manage to perpetuate their business model by having poor stock levels, and a small (relative to the number of games on the market over a few years time) selection.
That wasn't my point. My point was you were railing against an article told at the local level, while claiming "Furthermore, nobody is forcing them to sell the gutted game at full price." This wasn't about sympathy buys, but about understanding where the manager was coming from.
The article was supposedly told at the local level, but so what? That's irrelevant. The article implied that we should tolerate the policy because it was made by "corporate", but how does it matter to the customer who made the decision? Why aren't the managers pushing back to their district managers, or further up the chain about these policies? The fact that an article like this has to exist should be evidence enough that this is a bad policy for them, and a significant number of customers complain about it.
But at the same time, I have the power to say, "Hey, the only real difference here is I didn't have to take the shrink wrap off myself." If they're out of the game otherwise, I can walk home with a brand new copy, or I can throw myself at the mercies of whatever used copies they might or might not have.
Did you miss the part about the checkout policy? That's right, your "gutted , but still new" game may have been taken home to be played by a store employee. Not only does that make the game "not new" by even the most generous definitions of "new", but it is also technically illegal for them to sell that game as new in many (if not all) states. So yeah, you didn't have to take the shrink wrap off yourself, and somebody already played that copy of the game. Those are the only differences though. Coincidentally, they're the only differences between the non-gutted games, and the games on the used rack too... except that there's a "lifetime" guarantee that the game works when you buy it used. They don't offer that courtesy to the suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H customers who buy the gutted game.
If only a couple people in a store's region purchase a new game from Target or Wal-Mart instead of GameStop because of the gutting policy, they are probably losing more profit than they would if they ponied up for some mock boxes on the shelf. Keep in mind that they not only lost the sale of those few game copies, but the possibility of any up-sells they may have made to those customers on that visit. They may not lose enough to get put out of business because of it, but I'd bet they're losing enough to make the policy downright bone-headed.
The fact of the matter is that GameStop frequently doesn't receive enough copies of a game to cover its pre-orders. After the third time in as many years that it happened to me, I simply stopped shopping there. Plus you don't contest my assertion at all... This guy said pre-orders are taken only if the allotment is guaranteed. You start off by saying "pretty much guaranteed", which is exactly the same as "not guaranteed". Then you provide an example from your own experience of being sold a pre-release when the allotment wasn't guaranteed. You're agreeing with me, and you don't even realize it.
Lastly, there is no reason for game publishers not to operate like book publishers. In other words: Ship way too many copies, and take the extras back when they don't sell. It costs a very small amount to produce a disc and case, no matter what is on it. Yet they don't require this of the publishers they deal with.
Symbian and BREW developers are scarce, not because it's boring or unprofitable to develop for mobile platforms, but because it costs a fortune to get development licenses with the software vendors and distribution licenses with the carriers. If there was a truly open phone, with an SDK that allowed full network and display access, and users could install and run these apps without a carrier distribution aggrements, there would be many more mobile developers.
Nothing like building a big wall around yourself, then complaining that nobody ever comes to visit.
Most of the time, those empty boxes aren't the real deal. I can't say I've worked at a Gamestop and have special knowledge, but it doesn't take an insider to look at them and tell they aren't official. Often enough they don't even have anything on the back.
So they should have the publisher ship them some real ones....
Nobody may be forcing them to sell at retail price, except for corporate. Corporate has decided that since the game has essentially been untouched, the price should match accordingly. That, or they decided that they like screwing with people. It's not a decision any particular store's manager gets to make.
"Corporate"?
Who cares if an individual manager gets to make that decision or not? Am I supposed to make a sympathy buy because "corporate" forces a GameStop manager to do things that make me not want to shop there?
It doesn't matter to me at what level of the chain the decision was made. The fact of the matter is that I don't want to pay full price for a game with an open box, or a case with stickers all over the front. Especially when the game has a registration key.
If they go out of business because they won't change their policies, and enough people like me stop shopping there, that would be fantastic; because that would mean some other game chain could move in and take up their lost market... Or, you know, they could go back to not-sucking like before Electronics Boutique turned into EB Games... Or back to how Funcoland was before GameStop killed them...
I can't stress this enough; to remain a browsable, accessible small shop, 'gutting' a single copy is essentially unavoidable.
Complete bullshit. Gamestop has enough clout to get a few empty boxes for display purposes. They have empty boxes for the games on the wall to advertise pre-releases. "Gutting" a game is entirely unnecessary. Furthermore, nobody is forcing them to sell the gutted game at full price. If they feel they need a gutted box on the wall to sell a game, then when it comes time to sell the gutted copy, they are completely free to sell it at cost instead of taking full retail profit. It is also unnecessary for the store manager to give the customer a hard time when they change their mind and refuse to buy because the game is opened.
Reserves:
Preorders are only taken when their allotment can be guaranteed.
Complete bullshit. Preorders are taken for systems and games which haven't had their release-date or retail price announced yet. Are you telling me that those allotments are guaranteed? Did everybody who pre-ordered a Wii from you last Christmas get their system before the new year?
More importantly, if you're going to tell this blatant a lie, why should we believe the rest of the trash you're spouting?
DVD Trade-ins:
Many Gamestops don't take DVDs any more, and the company as a whole is phasing them out. DVDs are worth very little and you shouldn't bother.
Gamestop corporate just started a new chain called MovieStop where all they do is DVD trade-ins...
I understand your example, but I'm not sure how it fits in context.
You realize that an SRPM is just a CPIO archive containing pristine sources, maybe some diffs, and a spec file, right? Redhat *doesn't* provide modified sources. They *only* provide diffs. It just so happens that they also provide a tool that will automatically apply the diffs and compile the program.
No one anywhere ever should have to make concessions for another person. Let's ban everything just to make sure NO ONE is EVER offended!
You realize I was arguing against banning things, right?
You were being sarcastic, but you were also right. Nobody should ever have (as in, be forced) to make concessions for another person. Especially when that person is a guest on private property.
Yeah, yeah. Parents bitch about private establishments that don't allow children, smokers bitch about private establishments that don't allow smoking...
Now people who are on-call bitch about private establishments that don't allow cell phones...
I agree, there should be a sign, and blocking shouldn't occur without notice. But just because some people have jobs that suck their private life out of existence, it shouldn't mean the rest of us should have to make concessions.
Not only that, but the "school fund" is used for more than education. Depending on where you live it may be used for things like overpaying the superintendent's favorite lawn service, unneeded additional administrative assistants, high-salary board of education staff, etc...
No matter where you live inside the US it is definitely used for things like organized sports disproportionately to things like arts or even books.
Giving the schools more money doesn't mean you are giving your kids a better education. It might mean that... But it sounds like you didn't even check. You're just happy to open your wallet because the fund's name has "school" in it.
A special one-day limited quantity sale is hardly going to impact market penetration. the couple thousand players they'll sell at that price will be statistical noise in the total number of players sold over the next two months.
Better to look at the movies than the price. People aren't going to drop even $100 on a player that doesn't play movies they want to see.
This is a good point, which I mentioned in one of my other responses in this thread. I do have "the security talk" with every new user, and I'm sure that does have an effect.
This is going to sound harsh but your science education really failed you. You have a hypothesis that you've decided is true without any compelling evidence, and then twisted the evidence to argue that it proves the hypothesis.
Everybody is so quick to be on the attack...
I'm under no delusions that this was a scientific study, or that I "proved" anything. It's an anecdote. I called it a "social" experiment. Hell, my sample size was only four.
I'm well aware that there are other factors. A big one here was this: Unlike most companies, when you break your computer there, you're still responsible for getting your work done on-time. "I'm waiting for IT to fix my PC" isn't a valid excuse. So there's huge incentive not to break anything. Additionally, because there are so few users, I can give them 1-on-1 training on how to use their system safely. Most places can't say that.
It's still an interesting story though, as it does demonstrate the undisputed truth that up-to-date antivirus software still can't catch the most common 0-day viruses.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course they sold out. They were a low-quantity, loss leader gimmick to get you to line up outside their store at the ass-crack of dawn.
This sounds more like a "we're going to start playing dirty now too" announcement to me. I'd expect to see Sony bet the farm on buying HD-DVD out of the market. How can they possibly afford to lose?
As far as I'm aware, "fair credit" comes in the form of a paycheck. Everything else is just gravy.
"Nobody" watches the credits of a video game. Really I don't see any reason for them to be there at all. It only causes problems like this, and doesn't actually accomplish anything other than ego stroking.
Eh, it's either that or you're competing with a few thousand other people for spawns to complete the same quest objectives.
Really the only reason the game is MMO is so they can charge you a monthly fee. All the content can be divided up between "moderately multi-player" (between 5 & 80 people), and "you wish this was single player". The online functionality in WoW is essentially a regression from optimal (which they hit with Diablo 2). It's still a good game though. Worth playing a character through the level climb at least once for each faction.
I think copyright terms should be unlimited... sortof.
They should expire every 7 years, but with infinite renewals. For each renewal, the fee should increase exponentially.
This would accomplish several things. It would give a clear legal path to the use of orphaned works, it would force holders to assess the value of the work against the fee, thus causing more works to enter the public domain sooner, and for the companies that choose to maintain their copyrights for extreme periods, it would likely create a need for additional creative input to generate sufficient revenue to justify the high renewal fee.
As for Technological Restrictions, notice is not enough. Technological restrictions should be required to expire with the copyright, and allow fair use in order to qualify for protection under the DMCA at the very least. They should probably be completely illegal if they don't make those provisions.
Your assumption #2 is absurd.
For PC games, empty boxes could be shipped folded up. They certainly wouldn't take any more space than the other enormous cardboard promotional materials that get sent for a game.
For console games, they could just ship a label to insert into an empty, appropriately colored DVD case.
I don't know if you've noticed, but expensive cartridges have been replaced with dirt-cheap optical media. It used to cost orders of magnitudes more to "print" a video game compared to a book, and now it costs at least one order of magnitude less.
We're going in circles here. I don't need to give you an anecdotal example, because *all* GameStops were taking pre-orders for the items I listed in this post before the release dates and/or prices of the items were announced.
You don't need to be very muscular at all for it to tag you as "overweight" though.
I find it amusing that I've maintained approximately the same BMI between the ages of 20-30 even though a large percentage of my mass has moved from my chest and shoulders down to my waist.
Clearly I was much healthier from a body-fat perspective 5 years ago than I am now, but as far as government statistics and life-insurance companies are concerned nothing has changed.
Incidentally, there's a reason that GameStop doesn't pressure publishers to use the book publishing model instead of the pre-order model that they currently use:
The inability to return unsold games to the publisher makes it impossible for an independent video games store to turn a profit. By abusing their customers with the pre-order policy, they are able to ensure that competition is economically unfeasible. That way you continue to shop there even though they abuse you. Nice, huh? They actually manage to perpetuate their business model by having poor stock levels, and a small (relative to the number of games on the market over a few years time) selection.
The article was supposedly told at the local level, but so what? That's irrelevant. The article implied that we should tolerate the policy because it was made by "corporate", but how does it matter to the customer who made the decision? Why aren't the managers pushing back to their district managers, or further up the chain about these policies? The fact that an article like this has to exist should be evidence enough that this is a bad policy for them, and a significant number of customers complain about it.
Did you miss the part about the checkout policy? That's right, your "gutted , but still new" game may have been taken home to be played by a store employee. Not only does that make the game "not new" by even the most generous definitions of "new", but it is also technically illegal for them to sell that game as new in many (if not all) states. So yeah, you didn't have to take the shrink wrap off yourself, and somebody already played that copy of the game. Those are the only differences though. Coincidentally, they're the only differences between the non-gutted games, and the games on the used rack too... except that there's a "lifetime" guarantee that the game works when you buy it used. They don't offer that courtesy to the suckers^H^H^H^H^H^H^H customers who buy the gutted game.
If only a couple people in a store's region purchase a new game from Target or Wal-Mart instead of GameStop because of the gutting policy, they are probably losing more profit than they would if they ponied up for some mock boxes on the shelf. Keep in mind that they not only lost the sale of those few game copies, but the possibility of any up-sells they may have made to those customers on that visit. They may not lose enough to get put out of business because of it, but I'd bet they're losing enough to make the policy downright bone-headed.
The fact of the matter is that GameStop frequently doesn't receive enough copies of a game to cover its pre-orders. After the third time in as many years that it happened to me, I simply stopped shopping there. Plus you don't contest my assertion at all... This guy said pre-orders are taken only if the allotment is guaranteed. You start off by saying "pretty much guaranteed", which is exactly the same as "not guaranteed". Then you provide an example from your own experience of being sold a pre-release when the allotment wasn't guaranteed. You're agreeing with me, and you don't even realize it.
Lastly, there is no reason for game publishers not to operate like book publishers. In other words: Ship way too many copies, and take the extras back when they don't sell. It costs a very small amount to produce a disc and case, no matter what is on it. Yet they don't require this of the publishers they deal with.
Both have sizable developer communities too. There's a reason they weren't in my short list.
Symbian and BREW developers are scarce, not because it's boring or unprofitable to develop for mobile platforms, but because it costs a fortune to get development licenses with the software vendors and distribution licenses with the carriers. If there was a truly open phone, with an SDK that allowed full network and display access, and users could install and run these apps without a carrier distribution aggrements, there would be many more mobile developers.
Nothing like building a big wall around yourself, then complaining that nobody ever comes to visit.
So they should have the publisher ship them some real ones....
"Corporate"?
Who cares if an individual manager gets to make that decision or not? Am I supposed to make a sympathy buy because "corporate" forces a GameStop manager to do things that make me not want to shop there?
It doesn't matter to me at what level of the chain the decision was made. The fact of the matter is that I don't want to pay full price for a game with an open box, or a case with stickers all over the front. Especially when the game has a registration key.
If they go out of business because they won't change their policies, and enough people like me stop shopping there, that would be fantastic; because that would mean some other game chain could move in and take up their lost market... Or, you know, they could go back to not-sucking like before Electronics Boutique turned into EB Games... Or back to how Funcoland was before GameStop killed them...
Give me a break. Every "Gamestop screwed up a pre-order" story is an exception to the rule.
Fine. Replace "Wii" with "Nintendo DS Lite", or "PSP", or "Final Fantasy X", or...
The point is, they take pre-orders for things before they can possibly have any assurance that the order will be fulfilled.
Complete bullshit. Gamestop has enough clout to get a few empty boxes for display purposes. They have empty boxes for the games on the wall to advertise pre-releases. "Gutting" a game is entirely unnecessary. Furthermore, nobody is forcing them to sell the gutted game at full price. If they feel they need a gutted box on the wall to sell a game, then when it comes time to sell the gutted copy, they are completely free to sell it at cost instead of taking full retail profit. It is also unnecessary for the store manager to give the customer a hard time when they change their mind and refuse to buy because the game is opened.
Reserves:
Complete bullshit. Preorders are taken for systems and games which haven't had their release-date or retail price announced yet. Are you telling me that those allotments are guaranteed? Did everybody who pre-ordered a Wii from you last Christmas get their system before the new year?
More importantly, if you're going to tell this blatant a lie, why should we believe the rest of the trash you're spouting?
DVD Trade-ins:
Gamestop corporate just started a new chain called MovieStop where all they do is DVD trade-ins...
I understand your example, but I'm not sure how it fits in context.
You realize that an SRPM is just a CPIO archive containing pristine sources, maybe some diffs, and a spec file, right? Redhat *doesn't* provide modified sources. They *only* provide diffs. It just so happens that they also provide a tool that will automatically apply the diffs and compile the program.
All they need is the spec file, really... But it's trivial to generate SRPMs from those.
You realize I was arguing against banning things, right?
You were being sarcastic, but you were also right. Nobody should ever have (as in, be forced) to make concessions for another person. Especially when that person is a guest on private property.
Yeah, yeah. Parents bitch about private establishments that don't allow children, smokers bitch about private establishments that don't allow smoking...
Now people who are on-call bitch about private establishments that don't allow cell phones...
I agree, there should be a sign, and blocking shouldn't occur without notice. But just because some people have jobs that suck their private life out of existence, it shouldn't mean the rest of us should have to make concessions.
Curiously right around the same time they embedded Internet Explorer controls all over their products...
Not only that, but the "school fund" is used for more than education. Depending on where you live it may be used for things like overpaying the superintendent's favorite lawn service, unneeded additional administrative assistants, high-salary board of education staff, etc...
No matter where you live inside the US it is definitely used for things like organized sports disproportionately to things like arts or even books.
Giving the schools more money doesn't mean you are giving your kids a better education. It might mean that... But it sounds like you didn't even check. You're just happy to open your wallet because the fund's name has "school" in it.
A special one-day limited quantity sale is hardly going to impact market penetration. the couple thousand players they'll sell at that price will be statistical noise in the total number of players sold over the next two months.
Better to look at the movies than the price. People aren't going to drop even $100 on a player that doesn't play movies they want to see.
This is a good point, which I mentioned in one of my other responses in this thread. I do have "the security talk" with every new user, and I'm sure that does have an effect.
The obvious solution there is to start telling them that before they're old enough to know what "sue" means.
Unfortunately, that is becoming much more difficult, as I suspect we've got a few kids around here who's first word was "lawsuit".
Everybody is so quick to be on the attack...
I'm under no delusions that this was a scientific study, or that I "proved" anything. It's an anecdote. I called it a "social" experiment. Hell, my sample size was only four.
I'm well aware that there are other factors. A big one here was this: Unlike most companies, when you break your computer there, you're still responsible for getting your work done on-time. "I'm waiting for IT to fix my PC" isn't a valid excuse. So there's huge incentive not to break anything. Additionally, because there are so few users, I can give them 1-on-1 training on how to use their system safely. Most places can't say that.
It's still an interesting story though, as it does demonstrate the undisputed truth that up-to-date antivirus software still can't catch the most common 0-day viruses.