Good riddance in my opinion. Scummy company even before Mike Ashley took over.
I really do feel for staff that will be losing their jobs. But game as a business? Couldn’t care for them.
They where a Terrible company 20 years ago. Even more if a terrible company now.
A bit of a rant starts now:
Almost 20 years ago GAME wasn’t doing all that good. They where struggling why I I’m not sure as this was before digital downloads where a massive part of gaming. My guess is because they where greedy and places like Gamestation and supermarkets and even at that point the up and coming cex was much cheaper and better place the get video games from than GAME.
I remember the release day of the Xbox 360 for all the wrong reasons. I didn’t pre order a Xbox 360 as I didn’t want one. Until like 2 weeks before release when I played COD2 on a demo station and was hooked. Lucky enough a family member worked for Woolworths and was able to secure my dad a Xbox 360 Core console. My dad told me this and agreed to get me the Xbox for Christmas.
Because I wanted to see and feel and somewhat be apart of that Xbox 360 launch day. I decided I might as well go in to town and get a HDD drive and a wireless controller ready for Christmas day.
I went into 3 GAME stores as back then we had 3 within 5 mins of each other. All 3 of them had scummy practices going on. All 3 of them had some amount of Xbox 360 core and premium consoles. But wouldn’t sell them to customers on there own. You had to buy what they called special buy bundles. That didn’t save you any money at all. They just created a few bundles with the not so popular launch games. Like Amped, NBA and Tony Hawks. Depending eBay console you wanted you also had to get them with accessories. For example if you wanted a core console. You had to buy the console + them 3 games + Xbox live + hdd. Or premium instead of the HDD you had to get a play and charge kit.
I simply wanted to buy a wireless controller and HDD. They wouldn’t sell me the HDD unless I got the core pack controller. All 3 of them same bundle and same scummy practices. I went to Gamestation and sure they had similar bundles but noting insanely expensive like game. Core pack plus memory card was the cheapest bundle. You needed something to save your game data so it made sense.
They happily sold me a HDD without having to buy a console.
Unfortunately Gamestation was gone a few years later. Because it GAME!! Business was rubbish for them so in a last ditch attempt. They bought out Gamestation to become in a lot of cities the only video game store around. This saved them.
Then after the whole Xbox 360 launch. They did similar scummy practices with the Wii and PS3 launch.
They first went into administration in 2012. I was shocked they survived backed then to be honest as until this very day. They have always been the most expensive. The EA FC games are one of the biggest game releases here in the UK each year. Places like Smyth toys and Asda physical store sold these at £55 on release day for each platform and online stores like shopto and the game collection sold for the same price. But not GAME no no they charged £69.99 and wonder why they struggled.
