How GameStop Rollovers Competitors during the Holiday in Sales
There are dark days ahead for video game retailers. Wal-Mart’s holiday sales fell short of expectations, but at least they hung on to post a 1.6% gain on last year’s December numbers. Best Buy watched its Entertainment Software (including our pride and joy, video games) sales decline by 12.2%. With the worst holiday shopping season since 1970 behind us, how did GameStop, the world’s largest video game and entertainment software retailer, manage a 22.3% increase over last year’s sales?
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With the American economy’s schizophrenic behavior over the past few months, gamers have been doing whatever they can to cut the costs for new games. One of the easiest ways to shave off a few dollars is, of course, buying a used game from places like GameStop or eBay. The unfortunate part about doing this, however, is that the game developers make no money when their products are bought second hand. Now that used game sales are more profitable than ever (used games made up 49% of GameStop’s $1.8 billion in sales during 2008’s first quarter), members of the industry are speaking out against skimping on retail game purchases.