Life Behind The Counter

MTV Games has a run-down on a blog that relates what it is like behind a videogame store counter. The blog, DayintheLifeofVideogames relates the best and worst moments from their unique perspective on the games industry. From the article: "So pity the game store employee anxious to sell apples to people shopping for oranges. 'I die a little bit inside each time,' Post said. 'I think people are afraid to take a chance.' He gets just that close to getting people to buy the good stuff, but he said that if people haven't seen a TV commercial for a game, it's very hard to sell them on it. And cheer Post and Whitman for their acts of retail kindness, like warning customers buying EA's recent 'NFL Head Coach' that it doesn't actually let people play football. 'I warned two people, and both of them said, 'I'm glad you told me. I don't want it now,' ' Post said. 'You want to make the sale, but you don't want the guy to go home and say, 'That guy doesn't even know what he's talking about.'" It would be against the scriptures not to mention the most holy of holy books at this juncture. Yay, though I walk through the shadow of the non-believers, always do I keep the Acts of Gord in my mind.

Re:Again, Steam

[Blakey Rat]

Xbox 360 is the same way. Every disk game and Live Arcade game has a free demo available for everyone with a free Xbox Live account. IMO, that's one of the best features of the system and yet nobody talks about it.

Re:Sales

[Trogre]

Download Loose Change [demonoid.com]

And while you're at it, don't forget to have the Loose Change viewing guide [loosechangeguide.com] handy.

It's a shady industry.

[Kyokugenryu]

I was an employee at GameCrazy (Subsidiary of Hollywood Video), and I was always told to push, push, push. I actually was reprimanded more than once for reccomending someone NOT buy stinky games. I remember one instance in particular where a mother came in and had two games up: Spiderman 2 and Fantastic Four. Since FF came out that week, it had a $50 pricetag where Spiderman was only $20. I told her without a doubt, buy Spiderman 2 because FF is just terrible. My boss was very pissed at me for selling the cheaper game. I eventually was fired for low sales, but if you have a conscience about gaming, you simply can't work in that industry. The worst part was pushing the stupid "Club Membership", which was not worth the $20 they charged for it. 5% off used games and a magazine subscription isn't really worth $20, and the managers would get really upset that they weren't selling. Not only that, but we'd OFTEN take the discs out of "New" games to play in the store, then shrinkwrap them back up and put them on the shelf when we were done. The game was clearly used at this point, but if someone brought a game back that they hadn't even taken the adhesive seal off of, but the plastic was off, we couldn't give refunds, only trade-in value. To this day, I will NOT buy new games at a game store, because I know how we used to treat those discs. Games would be in demo units for days, weeks on end, and we'd just toss them back in, shrinkwrap it, and charge full price. This wasn't even an isolated thing, this was their policy to do this.