Game Store goes into administration - bollocks !

[BarryNormansSofa]

I have about £100 on a trade in card and boys have some gift cards - better get down there tomorrow and buy something !

Same here, DS2 has £20 on a gift card,

if they have gone into administration then i doubt the will be accepting gift cards

hope i'm wrong tho!

Their website is down so can't see how much some of their consoles are !

Would rather try and buy something and sell it on to get some money back !

Yes Cruithne - that did cross my mind about not accepted gift cards . Didn't the same thing happen with Woolies - did they accept them in the end ?

oh guys, there were news on them in danger of going under for weeks!
bollocks indeed

i'm not sure about wollies tbh

Yes I know that but other things tend to happen in life and it was not constantly in the news headlines - its not the end of the world but still annoying

Quite a lot of jobs will go, poor sods

They arent accepting gift cards. I've just heard from a friend who tried to spend her DS's, and to use the points on the reward card.

Tbh I dont think they are obliged to. Some shops continue to accept them but most dont.

oh well that is a 'bollocks' then !

5000 jobs to go

It would appear jobs have gone already - some stores this morning turfed out customers and closed their doors .

So I may have lost my vouchers etc but at least not my job.

Oh what a shame. Game was one of the few companies that I would actually recommend for great customer service. All their staff were really knowledgaeble and helpful (take note Curry's,Comet et al).

It did say in the news that they were hoping it could be taken on as a going concern so hopefully that means staff may get rehired?? Also with Woolies didn't it turn out you could use their vouchers at Zavvis (which I thought was somehow connected to Woolies and possibly was an on line off shoot) or did I dream it??)

Just googled. I was getting a bit confused. Zavvis were connected to Wooworths but went into administration. If I read it right when Zavvis went into administration a trust fund was set up so customers who bought vocuhers after a cetain date would be reimbursed. Other people were told to write to the administrators to make a claim.

Apparently there are 3 potential bidders for the business - will keep an eye on it and if not put it down to experience !

I always found staff to be helpful too - also they allowed my dog in the store !

Yeah RBS is one of them I would really like to know where RBS is getting the £85m they want for the thing.

As a 33 year old gamer who's been playing games for about 29 years, used to be a games tester for the 4th biggest publisher in the world and who's boyfriend used to work at GAME. I will say that I hated GAME, over the last 9 years they degraded into an awful business.

they had targets for how many warranties and reward cards the staff where meant to sell in a week, the in store chart was a lie, it didn't reflect sales, it was a marketing tool just advertisement space paid for by companies, they had reps round from the publishers several times a month to school the staff in how to sell the games in such a way that appeared they had actually played them when they hadn't, the shop assistants where on part time contracts so they had less rights then full time but often worked more hours a week then the management did.

My boyfriend left the company because of all that, as soon as they started the hard selling rubbish and trying to buy out the competition (Gameplay and Gamestation) and muscle the independent shops into bankruptcy by breaking release dates. They stopped actually caring about the products they sold it was all about selling as much guff as possible and talking people out of their money, they alienated the core market years ago.

I honestly don't know anyone who regularly buys anything from them, sure people go in there when they want a new console (better then waiting for Yodel to deliver) but no one went in there for games, the prices are on average £2 more then RRP, the second hand stuff often more money then the games are new from elsewhere and they stopped stocking the small titles, they just had the same big names you can get for less in Supermarkets, none of odd ball small independent titles that most websites/retailers don't carry (they used to be reliable for that now thats where HMV excels) so there really wasn't any reason for any gamer to shop there.

Just to make it clear I have nothing against anyone who works for GAME except the management they ruined every company they touched (GAME, Gamestation and Gameplay) stripping all the love out of them and care for the products, replacing it with mobile phone shop style selling ploys and targets. Now they will swan off from their highly paid positions with what ever cash they can stuff in their pockets, to drag some other poor sap of company/companies down. while the staff on the ground all stuffed thru no fault of their own.

ON news tonight said RBS are close to a deal - hope so for peoples jobs sake .

The Game in town today had a notice up saying it was closed, and thanks to all its customers.

Its a real shame as I much preferred Game shops to Gamestation Shops as Gamestation is always so dark and depressing.

I hate GAME too Ryoko, obviously sad about people losing jobs though. The thing that irritated me is they always pushed the second hand games even though they only charged a few pounds less for them. Obviously they got a bigger cut from those than selling a new game, but I feel this just takes money away from the industry as a whole, people will stop making new games if people don't buy them.

Ryoko what you say echoes everything I heard from people working for them.

AWimbaWay - GAME didn't understand the pre-owned market and never made an attempt to - Gamestation were great at that, but once they were bought out they not only did not try to use the Gamestation employee's experience but insisted on using their own ways which were not set up with dealing with pre-owned. That was one of the reasons that sent the whole business tits-up.

Preowned is difficult as it is - with games manufacturers coming up with more and more ways of making selling on useless through downloadable content, single use codes etc, but pre-owned did not neccessarily take away that much - hardcore gamers who bought a new game as soon as it was released, playing it through within a week, thus releasing funds to buy another new game.

Jeeps, ds spent his gamestation gift card yesterday he would have been gutted.

It's a shame, gamestation used to be a really good shop with staff who knew what they were talking about.

ds1 has some money on a giftcard from Game. I told him about a month ago that the company was in trouble and he should spend his card quickly. He wasn't interested and didn't follow my advice: hope he's learned his lesson!

The problem with Game is that it's in a low margin dying market and being squeezed on all sides. Supermarkets sold games at rock bottom prices, they don't care. They've food to make their margins on, so selling the latest game at a slight loss to get people through the door works for them.

Amazon, play.com et al squeezed them online. Why pay £45 for a game when you can get it for £30 from the web?

Lastly and I never understood this at all....why have several stores all in the same centre? So for example Meadowhall has 2 GAME stores and a Gamestation. So that's 3 lots of rent.....3 lots of staff.....

Games are also being more frequently downloaded and it's only a matter of time before we won't bother buying a physical game anymore than I buy a CD. If I want music I just download it from iTunes. The same will happen with games, especially as broadband gets faster as BT roll out more FTTC in the next few years. Games which would have taken a day to download will take an hour. Less time & hassle than driving, parking, buying food etc.

Well the main reason for the large number of stores was muscling out the competition, GAME took a Starbucks approach to business, Chiswick used to have a Gamestation so GAME opened a store there despite having stores at Hammersmith and Shepherds Bush, The Chiswick branch has all ways traded at a loss/just broke even, when they bought Gamestation they just shut the Chiswick branch of that (which had a large amount of Retro titles) and kept the GAME open, it's still dead in there, they wouldn't shut it as there was no other stores in the area that sell games. But they wouldn't shut the one in Hammersmith because HMV is there, wouldn't shut the one in Shepherds Bush because HMV and an independent shop are there.

You get the idea.

I still have no idea why they kept the Gameplay, Gamestation and GAME websites open when all sold the same things for the same price, with the same P&P etc.

They where just a badly managed company. Which is why I am convinced they will be bought by someone and kept going but with far fewer shops, the market is there, it's just GAME expanded beyond it and tried to compete with supermarkets instead of look at what they could do what the supermarkets don't.