RF Generation Message Board

Who knows if it will actually happen, but apparently Gamestop sees value in the vintage game market again...

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/08/30/gamestop-ceo-company-could-expand-into-vintage-games-business/

UPDATE
Gamestop provides more details on their plan.  Anyone hate the idea any less?  More?

http://www.joystiq.com/2012/09/07/gamestop-ceo-details-progress-of-vintage-game-sale-initiative/

Coming from the company that decided old stock was better to destroy than store?

I have my doubts...

*sigh* I remember watching many a great game snap into pieces under the booted heal or even hammer of a Gamestop Manager during periodic 'field destroys'.  Still have to see it on occasion.  Each time, I feel a great disturbance in my heart, as if millions of voices from video-gameless children in hospitals and poor households cry out in terror and are suddenly silenced.

Stupid, so stupid.  If it didn't mean my job, I'd have rescued every one of them.  Lots of kids could've benefited from those.  Such a waste.

Gamestop probably looked at places like Games Plus and all the other Mom-and-Pop retro gaming stores around and thought, 'Oh s**t we need to make more monies.'

Since the one thing I like about Gamestop is that they support the second-hand used game market, I'm cool with it so long so long as the prices are reasonable. If I can find some decent Sega Genesis/CD/Saturn/Dreamcast stuff CIB at a decent price, I'll look into them.

But that being said, if they start charging $20-$30 for cheap common NES cart-only games, I'll likely laugh and walk out of the store while checking online prices and going back to my second-hand retro stores.

Gamestop, oh how much do I hate thee? Let me count the ways...

I once saw 600 PS2 games in boxes marked destroy, because they didn't sell and they didn't have the cases for them. I asked the manager about it, and they said they couldn't donate them because it would be considered theft. They would've been more than happy to donate them to the Children's Hospitals here in town.

Also, I sincerely doubt that GameStop will sell them for anything near competitive prices. It just makes no sense for them to ship out a $1 game when it costs them $3 to ship it. Likely, most games will be a baseline price of $5 or $10, with the more popular games ranging towards $20 or $30 like SMB3. People are willing to pay those stupid prices at the flea market, so I see no reason why GameStop wouldn't do it. How will it hurt them? They're already sitting in the warehouses for 10+ years.

It wont work. It's too late for GameStop to recover from their own stupidity. I belive around 7 years from now GameStop will be a thing of the past and I will wish them good riddance.

The reasoning for me saying this is GameStop is late to the game of retro games. I see it like this.

In my area there is only one independent game store that sells new and retro games and consoles. I live in a city of about five million people. There are about 25 GameStops in my vicinity. They have diluted their own market so much that even with retro games they wont get a decent selection per store.

If this was to start today I wouldn't expect to walk into a GameStop a year from now and see more than a hundred retro games per store in their inventory.  It wont catch on well, the retro game market is a niche and not big enough to turn profit for their company.

Everything will head towards digital downloads and GameStop will be screwed. Thank god I hate that place. Call me an asshole but I hope they go out of business.

When my local Gamestops (yes plural - there are a bunch of 'em) were still selling PS2 and Gamecube games, it was worth it to pop in and load up on some old newer classics. Particularly since they always had a "buy two get one" deal. They've since been sticking mainly with the current gen and while I am still a customer of those titles (used), I definitely don't spend as much money on them as I do the retro games. So if they can display a decent selection of old titles at decent prices, I may be inclined to check it out.

That being said, I'm also not a fan of the store. I go there when I have to but I hate having to explain why I don't want to pre-order some game I have zero interest in. I'd rather patronize the mom-and-pop game store - if only there were some around me.

This is apparently going to just be online only, though I wouldn't be surprised if they started stocking games in their physical stores again down the road.

I doubt I'd buy from them either way. There's so many other options out there.

I don't think that carrying older games would make any sense for GameStop.  How many games from 10+ years ago are worth more than $1-3?  There is absolutely no margin on those kinds of games.  I could see them selling popular titles such as Super Mario Bros 3 and Sonic the Hedgehog, but where are they going to build up an inventory of these games?  They've already cleared out their inventory of "classic" games, and I don't think this effort is going to be worthwhile for them.  Most people who shop online will know of eBay, and will likely resort to eBay or Amazon to buy older games instead of GameStop.

Unless GameStop somehow finds a whole warehouse full of Silent Service (they are worth ~$75, right?) I think that they're better off keeping shelf space (and inventory space) stocked with current generation games.

As much as I dislike their policies I would still buy a copy of Combat for the 2600 from them just to see what the clerk would try and ask me to preorder.

LOL. Would you like to put down $5 for a copy of Video Olympics?

I wish I collected back when we got our first Gamestop back in my hometown. Back then I was blissfully unaware of their practices and seeing those now much hated stickers still on some NES, SNES, Genesis, and 64 games from time to time at like $.69 just sounds tempting to load up on commons.

Gamestop can eat a dick.

I hate this.  I wouldn't doubt it if we see prices rise at local retro stores.

As an employee, I've seen what the general masses want, and this isn't going to last. I love retro systems, as 80% of my collection to this days is still PS2 (I know that's not really considered retro YET, but c'mon, the system is 10 years old). They're merely trying to recapture an audience that has abandoned them ages ago, and I don't blame them for leaving. I go to Play N Trade for all my retro stuff and will continue to do so.

This will have an effect on the retro gaming market forsure. They buy games for less then ma and pa stores and sell them for more. NES and SNES prices are going to get jacked up. Back in the day they used to sell retro. But I dont know how fairly priced games will be now, considering I cant imagine where they will get a decent inventory.

But once it fails will they destroy the games again?  I have a terrible feeling about this.....

And I still wont shop at Gamestop.

I would actually be curious where they are getting the games from.  Knowing how these corporations work they would have had to aquire at a very good price warehouses full of old stuff.

I certainly not worried about this affecting prices in local stores.  If anything I see sales in these small stores increase a bit (really just from non-mainstream consumers) as Gamestop will likely price high to test the market in each region.  Plus, there is a great chance this won't be nationwide.

That made me laugh.

This

This is actually brilliant on their part. Now that they have destroyed countless games, they have now created a slightly rarer game. Which makes for higher prices...

Gamestop sucks donkey balls.

I have Ply n Trade & a Local shop. I don't need a store that ove rprices things charges new prices for used games and likely just toss cases away or something. GS cares not about condition either. I do remember when working there in 2006 people always asking about SNES,PSone,N64 Games

I hope you guys like peeling off their price stickers.

The new stickers they have up here are actually fantasticly easy to peal off. Much better than the old style, have to soak in goo-gone, type ones.

updated..

...still bullshit. At least they detailed how they would do consoles, which basically amounts to RetroDuo and other clones. Count me out unless they let fully document their titles online, including condition of cartridge and contents of the package (e.g. box, manual, etc.)

Whatever executive guy they got for that interview should be fired.  Fuzzy ideas, disregard for historical trends and a general ignorance of the nature of the business from the top down. Its crap like this that's indicative of why this company is floundering:

"Sometimes what's funny is if you put a pre-owned title in the store, a lot of customers may not really want it in a store," Raines said. "But if you're a collector of Call of Duty, and there's an old Call of Duty original, Call of Duty 2, floating around, it has a lot of value for you."

Yeah, the hardcore retro collectors are all over the Call of Duty series.  What a joke!

...That was one example.  They're not necessarily trying to cater to the "hardcore retro collectors", but to the people who don't know where to buy older used games, or even what they're worth.  Even physical GameStop storefronts aren't for the collectors (generally).  They're meant to pull in soccer moms who don't know the value of games.

I once saw someone pay $50 for cart-only copies of Super Mario Bros 2 and Super Mario Bros 3.  Now, any collector will know that $50 is outrageous for those two games.  However, because the person who bought them wasn't a collector, it was obviously worth the $50 to them for either the nostalgic value or whatever reason they had.  GameStop is trying to attract those people, the people who will pay over the value of the game because they simply have no idea where or even how to acquire this stuff.  Surprising, yes, especially in the internet age.

Now, I don't know if GameStop has the ability to acquire and price all of these games they're going to be carrying, but they could certainly make money by buying huge quantities and by selling them over their usual online retail value.

The part I was most interested in was when the CEO hinted that they may even still be sitting on huge quantities of older video game stock.  New consoles, maybe?  :drool:

^Pretty sure you got this right, judging from what the store managers have been chatting about.  Gamestop isn't about gamers who frequent the likes of RFGeneration; we are, in the grand scheme, a super-niche market.  They're after the youth culture that buy NES belt-buckles from Hot Topic, soccer moms who remember the first Sonic the Hedgehog, and white-collars who didn't care about sports except NHL '94 on Genny. 

And GS has been sitting on a small stock of such old games in a few warehouses for years.  After a system was discontinued long enough, the outer district stores field-destroyed most of the final titles they had left in stock because the reasoning was that if they didn't sell at the discount prices they were posted at, they weren't worth the cost of shipping to storage.  But long before that, GS had tons of stuff in their product distribution warehouses that they use to keep stocking product that sell better in specific areas.  We're almost certainly not going to see unsold, sealed NES toploaders or even A2600 Chase the Chuck Wagon; just common and some uncommon titles with the occasional rare that slipped through the cracks.  The condition will be on par with the product they stock nowadays; because even though these games have been in the company since buyouts from EB Games, Software ETC, Funcoland, and the rest, the condition of the titles were rarely accounted for, much less boxes and manuals. 

And we can bet that GS is currently searching for (or is already in negotiations with) hardware makers to supply retro console clones to play these on.

The idea of a Gamestop Entertainment System to play all the 'cool' retro games sends shivers down my spine. I'm just going to hope they are sitting on some Little Samsons to help lessen demand.

Oh, I can't imagine their branded clones would be any worse than some of the cheaper ones on the market.  Probably end up being the exact same with a GS logo, or simply selling some of the cheaper clones as is.

As for something Little Samson rare, you can imagine any GS exec who looks up price comparisons on eBay (something the CEO mentioned already as what helped convince him to get back into the market) that exec is gonna either raid the stock, or price it to sell as ludicrous as what he sees online.

Brings back memories of the Sears Video Arcade, and Majesco SEGA products. I agree with slackur that it will probably be a GS logo, or just a straight up clone.

Well, there goes the neighborhood. Seriously, I was really liking that mom and pop game stores had managed to find a niche that Gamestop wasn't dominating.

Also, who sees this driving up the price of retro items?

I doubt it will.  At this point, there is more than enough supply of older video games to satiate whatever demand GameStop is going to induce.  I can't see GameStop's customers paying $10,000 for Stadium Events, but they would probably pay $10-20 for Super Mario Bros. 3.  I don't think eBay prices will rise much, if any.

I don't see this driving up prices. Gamestop understands that there target audience isn't people shelling out hundreds of dollars for rare carts, but folks that want SMB/DH, SMB 3, etc.

I don't know, just based on the markup of their used game market on current gen stuff, I just have this vague nightmare about them driving up prices on the retro stuff because "people will totally pay for it." I can see your view on it. I'm just feeling paranoid. I don't usually buy into the Gamestop hate, though I don't often shop there.

I don't see them selling much retro stuff at all.  There are better outlets for buying used games elsewhere.