Retail is dead

 Long live Retail

When I went out this morning past I saw a peculiar sight. As I travelled on my normal journey towards the bustling heart of the town I live near, cloaked by the torrential downpour that somehow always seems to come out for my singular benefit each and every day, I spied upon the highstreet. Ever the busy port of call no matter what time of day, week or year it is, fit to bursting with so much more people then, I'd bet, the modern health guidelines would recommended. And yet no where near as many from years past, and I don't just say that with rose-tinted glasses. In memory I recall a suffocating crowd, the kind of which you'd have to haughtily fight your way through to have any hope of reaching your store, umbrellas and walking sticks became batons and spiked bats in that arena of bodies, and no quarter was spared for either women or children. 'Twas a bloody ordeal, for which boys were made men. Yet that was no more in this relatively barren, yet still uncomfortably full, highstreet of today. Of course, that was but the salve pre-applied around the wound I was about to receive when I turned the corner and saw, to my dismay, the empty spot where once was my local Gamestop store.

Now I know I've not exactly been kind to Gamestop in past, though I endeavour to affirm that they absolutely deserved every inch of my scathing chagrin. Theirs was a business model built around "We're the best and we'll always be around, do your best to keep all Online endeavours as surface level as possible, deals as skewered as possible and general customer experience just south of spitting on them." If I had alternatives, I'd never have gone to Gamestop. But I didn't, and there's the key. Retail stores have been dying off left right and centre and for my town I'd reached the point where the only serious retail gaming shop was Gamestop, which is now no more. Sure there are a smattering of understocked second-hand stores, but all of those are small chain stores anyway, nothing with character left in the area. But what is the real reason I lament the loss of my Gamestop? The Hardware.

Good lord, if there's one thing we all lose out on with this new age of online marketplaces it's access to easy hardware. Well, that and a lot of esoteric and societal issues are raised such as security of jobs, homogenisation and monopolisation all atop of a general erosion of local economy, but none of those real topics really have much of a place here so I'm sticking to the Hardware talk. Do you have any idea how hard it still is to get ahold of the next gen consoles? Of course you do, because it's still nigh-on impossible and relying on the respective developer store fronts is unreliable because- oh yeah, they decided not to bother with them this generation. The physical stores were my last hope to get a next gen console without having to do battle with an Entire Yakuza sub-division's worth of scalpers, but now I guess I need to start stocking up on Staminan X and practising ripping off my shirt with one hand. (How many shirts do the Yakuza cast go through in the series do ya think? And what about the cost; they always dress designer, afterall, yikes...)

But perhaps most depressingly of all is that loss of sense of community that you had the chance to interact with. As a gamer, there's not really a lot of others out there who are involved enough with the genre to entertain the odd casual chat about the titles you're looking forward to and the ones you're working through right now. Unless you're crazy enough to try and find someone to talk to on the Internet, but man; they're all crazies on that thing, I wouldn't touch it with a barge pole if I were you... There's not really another place you can look at other players in the face and know that someone out there does play games too, for someone like me who really doesn't have anyone to talk to or interact with, all of that meant- something at the very least. It made me feel, at all. Which is more than what I can say about most things in my day-to-day. I felt.

And now that's gone. Or at least around my neck of the woods. And I'm solemn in that realisation. This time I can say that I'm not just bemoaning things changing, as it's often quite easy to get lost between the act of witnessing change and just seeing something die. I think we're watching physical retail die, and the Online space just isn't built to take over wholesale for it. At least not today. It's like a members-only club where the majority of key services are either run by a regional bully or split between two or three. You want a meal delivery service, pick from the three. You want a job search site, pick from the three. You want to order something that isn't food or specific tech; it's pretty much just Amazon. Just bite the bullet and pay Jeff his blood money so he can fuel his next trip to space, everybody; don't worry, he'll thank us at the next press interview! (Dick.)

This was an inevitability, however. No one can stare around in confusion and wonder how we got here because we all saw this coming from a mile away. (All except the executives at Gamestop, that is.) Reggie from Nintendo was hired to be part of the board of directors a while ago, as I covered in a creative little blog that I liked at least even if no one else did, but little has come of that. The man may be a legend but he's no miracle worker, and I bet even the Messiah would have his work cut out for him at this point. The Gamestop stock debacle from earlier this year was fun and it redistributed some wealth in a net positive direction, but it's just drop in bucket against the tsunami that is the changing times. There's nothing to be done to save retail, perhaps there never was, the new age is upon us and it has been for a while now. Part of me knew I was clinging to the safety net of having a nearby store from an entity that didn't realise it was dead yet, but that doesn't make the cold shock of seeing it's corpse sting any less.

So with this new age really should come some consumer rights. Yeah, I'm turning this right around into a complaints blog, because online ain't perfect by a long shot. Why are there still no revisions to purchasing laws so that buying software is actually, you know, buying the software? We're 'licencing' under the good graces of our penny pinching overlords, hoping that they'll always be benevolent down upon us because they have kind-of been up until now. We know that these developers and storefront owners have full control over our library of games, and there's already a least one documented case of a company, EA in this instance, nuking someone's entire library of games that he had purchased. Now did he deserve it? Sure. But that sort of power isn't really ethical for EA, or anyone, to be holding anyway. When we buy a game, we should own that game, and trade laws need to be updated to support that most basic of consumer rights. Don't wait for that loophole to screw us all, fix it now!

Unfortunately little can be done for the Hardware situation many find themselves in, but we're working with baby steps as we try to make Online storefronts more sensible and hospitable. Until 3D printing technology improves to the point where we can scan and copy new hardware into our homes, something which I'd like to think can't be too far off in the grand scheme of technological advancement, we're stuck with Amazon. Personally, I'm already waging up the further afield Gamestop stores for the time being, seeing which are worth the trek to get the new consoles at the very least. But such is a limited-time endeavour and I can't imagine it'll be long before official gaming hardware accessories will go 'order only'. And on such a dark day I can only hope that manufactures learn to respect us enough to at least provide the product themselves. (Wouldn't that be nice?)