GameStop To Stay Relevant By Infecting Game Development
In an effort to stay afloat among the incoming wave of gamers buying gaming content digitally or generally avoiding the terrible practice that is pre-ordering games, GameStop is reportedly throwing their hat into developing exclusive in-game content. According to VentureBeat, executives are hashing out plants to get involved with developers in order to create GameStop only content so that they can boost pre-orders of upcoming video games.
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A representative from GameStop confirmed that the plans were “accurate,” as public relations spokesperson Jackie Smith said, “We are working with our [development] partners to build in a longer lead time. And we are working with them to get both physical and digital exclusives for our customers.”
There is absolutely no need to buy a pre-order for any video game. If you do plan on buying a video game at launch, your local store is near 100% likely to have it available and fully stocked for quite some time, so you don’t need to give anybody your money before you actually have a product in hand. The only valid reason to pre-order anything would be for a console at launch (due to physical limitations in production), but even at that point being an early adaptor with launch title games only is not worth spending the maximum amount of money possible.
In the eyes of GameStop, it absolutely makes sense that they try to pull this off. The business is in decline as more people are becoming informed that you don’t have to give the company near 80% profits off of a trade-in that sees them resell for near full price on Day 2 without developers seeing a dime. They’re even selling phones, at this point, in an effort to sustain profits. Make moves in business, or stay stagnant and die off.
It is the developers that agree to put exclusive GameStop content in their games that should receive public ire, as well. Whoever agrees to this can no longer argue that you’re creating unique stories and gameplay experiences to make bank in an honest way. Holding back content so that only people that buy your game at one store can have access to it from Day 1 is ludicrous. It’s more indefensible than selling pre-order content as DLC to non-pre-order customers.
Hopefully developers and publishers will avoid this idea like the plague and that those who do agree to it get publicly and financially scorned, but that is unlikely to happen. It’s nice to want things, I guess.
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