GAME Hikes Up Preowned Game Prices
Only a few days after reporting that 2011 isn’t going well for them, the UK retailer GAME has hiked up prices on its preowned stock. Most of the preowned stock being carried in GAME stores has been raised “at least a price bracket”, according to a senior GAME employee talking to Nukezilla (who asked not to be named).
Games that were in the £2.99 bargain bin are now in the £4.99 pile, replacing games which have now been upgraded to the £7.99 price tag.
To give a few specific examples, in some stores (but not online) Halo: Reach was raised from £17.99 to £22.99, Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit went from £12.98 to £14.99 and Portal 2 had a price upgrade from £29.99 to £34.99.
The state of GAME’s preowned stock is a pretty big mess at the moment. Different stores have different prices, and they seem totaly independant from the online store which itself is suffering from some kind of schizophrenia. To take an example given above, on GAME’s online store NFS: Hot Pursuit is £19.98 new, yet £24.99 preowned.
GAME need to give people reasons to go to their store (online or otherwise), which is less convenient that sites like Amazon and not as cheap as supermarkets. Messing around with the preowned pricing in such a scatter-gun fashion isn’t filling me with confidence.
Well, guess which store I am never going to again.
That’s some bullshit. The only GAME stores I’ve visited here in Sweden already charge insane prices for used games. We’re talking about charging 700 SEK for year old popular games like Zelda when any acceptable shop, online or not, charges 500-600 SEK for new, newly released games. At the most.