So after recently completing my dis-track against all thing retail- which is to say penning my blog about the failures of retail in regards to the isometric genre of games from the viewpoint of old school isometric legends - you'd have thought I would be done talking about brick and mortar in the gaming space for a while. Afterall, it often seems like the rest of the industry is good and happy to leave physical retailing middle men in the past as an inconvenience of the yesteryear totally redundant in this new digital age within which we live and 'thrive'. If you count 'thriving' as shivering in abject terror over the possibility that everything you have can be snatched away in the blink of an avaricious eye. (And people wonder why we're so standoffish about new markets entering the selling space, as though we don't see entire game catalogues vanish often enough to be worried.)
Digital is far from being the ideal front of ownership thanks to frankly lax laws pertaining to digital ownership, but as legislators around the world slowly become more familiar with the bare basics of the Internet, I personally squeeze my fingers together and pray a come-to-Jesus moment will shake some sense into those areas of lawmaking sooner rather than later. In the meantime, however, we have publishers like Ubisoft eager to take advantage of the frank disconnect that currently exists between game ownership and game sellers through it's newest initiative- changing the name of Uplay for the one hundredth time! (Seriously, I stopped keeping track of the name at least two console generations ago.) This shift counts attempt number umpteenth of Ubisoft pushing for 'innovation' in an anti consumer fashion.
Subscription services for access to games in a manner similar to gamepass but with a much reduced library and a presumed inability to access this media elsewhere. (Ubisoft does like their platform exclusivity whenever they can pull it off.) All in an attempt to get consumers familiar with this style of delivery, as their head of subscription rather frankly conveyed in an interview on the matter. "That’s the consumer shift that needs to happen.- it’s about feeling comfortable with not owning your game." About as damning as a sentiment can get, and fairly bare-faced in the manner to which Ubisoft want to overpower the right of the audience to play what they want, when they want. Because afterall, that is how a mediocre vampire of a publisher like Ubisoft can continue sucking the blood out of the playing public for the right to play their games.
But retail doesn't seem like it wants to put up a fight as it goes extinct to the meteor, or at least that's the impression I'm left with after witnessing the announcement that the UK retailer 'GAME' is moving to discontinue their second-hand game business entirely! In the past people could pass their games in at Gamestop and proceed to be robbed blind by the shocking trade-in value there- but at the very least somebody like myself, more interested in amassing a collection than being thrifty, could pick up a cheap second-hand game from the shelves. Recent developments have made that an increasingly less worthwhile pursuit, not least of all for the fact that nowdays second hand physical titles from GAME retail for about the same amount as a fresh copy, and the fact that buying from Amazon is generally cheaper and more convienet. (Jeff Bezos looking like he's about to murder another retail store right now!)
There's not a lot in the way of competition when it comes to GAME down here in England, outside of regional franchises and private owned gaming enthusiast stores. The only reason GAME could possibly have for shutting itself up in this way would have to be the lack of income available to be able to make such a market work- presenting clearly the disappearing market of Second Hand. We all forsaw this, all warned about it, but now with the chaos happening before our very eyes there is little else to do but stare on in sad horror as the fortold comes to pass. Soon digital storefronts will have even more power over the consumers then they already, lamentably, do- and there's nothing worse for consumers than to be caught beneath a monopoly. Except, perhaps, to be caught between the pulling weight of two monopolies. Yes, that does sound worse actually...
And on the far end of the spectrum we have the sad story of Gamestop, who found itself insnared within the very same trap that saved them all those years ago. We all remember the rags to riches tale when a bunch of memers managed to out-short a firm betting on Gamestop's demise and make thousands in the doing. But we try to forget the fact that Gamestop then pivoted to making themselves all about cryptocurrency and decentralised markets and, lamentably, the NFT trend. That's right, in an act of transparent desperation, Gamestop tried to launch its own chain of mindless NFTs in the hope it would pop off and make millions for them just like... hardly any of these NFT collections actually do. They might as well have gone gambling on the stock market for all the good it would do them.
That they actually lasted this long before pulling the plug on their NFT collection is actually a little bit scary. The market completely crashed, several exchanges well pulled over in the wreck and Bitcoin plummeted to insane lows. In fact, Bitcoin was actually on it's way back up (Relative to it's cataclysmic collapse) by the time that Gamestop realised the NFT market was well and truly dead, demonstrating a shocking lack of awareness of the world around them. Heck, maybe there were a couple of Reddit Stock-advice chuds feeding the project just enough to justify it's existence before going broke and leaving Gamestop high and dry. Who knows?
Ultimately this isn't exactly the healthiest doctor's check-up on the absolute state of the retail market in 2024. As Jeff Bezos prances slowly through the streets with his reaper's scythe, eyeing up his next victim, it's seeming more and more likely that highstreet game stores are just offering up their neck begging to be put out of their misery. And maybe while we're at it, perhaps we might sneakily slap Ubisoft's painfully redundant storefront on the chopping block too? You know, clean up the market, so to speak? At least we have the championing efforts of people like Sven Vincke to impress that even if physical does end up lamentably going the way of the dodo- some vague image of ownership exists within digital purchases. And who knows, maybe with people like him staving off the greedy ghouls long enough, we might get some of those law reforms we need so badly.
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