UK supermarket giant Tesco has begun rolling out its videogame trade-in service across the country after a trial back in February. Originally, Tesco were examining the lucrative business practice, and it seems that their trials have been positive with around 60 stores listed as trading-in games and some also selling pre-owned titles. It looks as though it’s mostly the larger Extra stores which are getting the service.

According to MCV, Tesco will pay you £12 for FIFA World Cup 2010, £17 for Mario Kart Wii and £19 for Red Dead Redemption on 360. Not bad, although I’ve not seen the recent prices for any of the above games in the more specialised stores. (Currently being in Wales where we barely have electricity).

Tesco seems to have a finger in lots of pies, so this should come at no surprise. Stores like Game and Gamestation have to be trembling a bit, as having your game trade-ins right next to your shopping is certainly an attractive prospect. Neither specialised store is doing particularly great at the moment, so I imagine that this will only serve to compound the problems that they’re facing.

Despite concerns about the price, MCV is reporting that UK retailers are receiving a hefty amount of pre-orders for Microsoft’s motion system, with reports that one retailer is telling its stores to try and get 10 pre-orders a day from its customers. MCV also say that sources are expecting Kinect to hit half a million advances sales before it launches in November.

Grainger Games’ sales director Phil Moore told the website that “customers [...] feel the price is appropriate to the product” and that “it is set to become our biggest pre-order to date.” The Hut Group’s Sarah Jaspe said that “Based on our orders thus far, customers are clearly excited by this offering and price.” Previously, many in retail were dismayed with the price, with most looking for Kinect to be a sub-£100 product.

I’ve had some reservations about the price, but if these reports are to be believed it seems that it might just be a case of the press making a bigger issue of the price than normal people do. While Kinect might not be for the majority of core gamers, there’s obviously huge appeal in the casual market; the Wii being evidence for that. However, these are just pre-orders, not full sales. While it might be promising for Microsoft and retailers, until the units really hit the shelves we won’t know if consumers are going to jump at Kinect like they have done with the Wii.

There was an interesting article over at Gamer Limit which explored this perception of the Kinect being over-priced, with the writer arguing that if you’re not even going to buy it, why are you complaining? This might just be an “inside baseball” problem, where normal people actually see the worth in jumping around like idiots and we’re all just cynical, grumpy gits. Now get off my lawn.

The next annual E3 looms right around the corner, and here we have some more OnLive related news, it seems. OnLive, if you forgot — but how could you? It’s only potentially going to kill the games retail industry — is the service that lets you stream games with a little box plugged into your TV, or through your PC.

According to Eurogamer, if you were one of the first 25,000 people who registered for OnLive, you get your first year of service for free. They’re not taking any more sign-ups until the service launches (June 17), so this offer is already irrelevant those of us unlucky enough to not have been in that first chunk of people.

It’s cool for the people that got it, and hopefully they didn’t screw anyone over by adding something to the fine print that makes it so you can’t get out of paying for the service after the first year is up. As bitter and ambivalent about the service as I am — mostly due to my inadequate internet connection — I am genuinely interested in how well OnLive performs. If the pre-registration already being closed is any indication, it would appear that they’re on the right path.

After slaughtering the independent stores, it seems Game Group who own Game and Gamestation are struggling. They have announced they’ll be closing 18 stores (of their 682 total) and all of the concessions in Debenhams, with a total of 247 jobs going. They are doing this to help “maximise the opportunities” (i.e. not keep haemorrhaging money) and have “detailed plans to support the customers and employees” (i.e. fuck ‘em) already in place.

Though at least in the press release they admit to one of the reasons they’re having so many problems: “The majority of the identified sites are located close to another one of our stores”. Game have been one of those companies, like Subway, who happily put their stores as close to competitors as possible, even if the competitor is another Game. It simply maximises the companies profit at the cost of the individual store.

With more people either going online for games or going to the cheaper supermarkets I’m impressed Game are even still around. With recent news that Tesco and Asda are looking into murdering Game’s trade-in market, things are looking bleak.

Via: Edge

You know that scene in Star Wars where the Star Destroyers are flying around and then the shadow of the Super Star Destroyer eclipses them all? This is just like that.

UK supermarket giants Tesco and Asda have reportedly started trials of pre-owned game trade-ins in a few of their stores. Asda have introduced the practice in one of its Leeds stores with Tesco trialling it in Essex, with the possibility of it being in other stores too.

The move, if introduced nationwide, could cause huge disruption to stores like GAME and Gamestation who use trade-in services to increase their intake. MCV notes that other non-specialist stores have being using trade-ins across the UK, with HMV offering a similar service (although from personal experience, rubbish prices). Tesco and Asda are two of the biggest retailers in the country, meaning that they can often offer games at reduced prices. At launch, both Tesco and Asda sold Fifa 10 for as little as £24.97 ‘“ half the regular price.

This will probably mean cheaper games for us, but publishers are likely to see this as another threat to their income as they make no money from pre-owned sales.

Electronic Art’s Jason DeLong has come out and suggested that the pricing model for videogames could change, and we could actually see games becoming cheaper than they are currently.

He cites ‘œhard times’ as a reason for developers to consider charging less for games upfront but using ‘œepisodic content’ and other downloadable extras to make up the lost income. A “first one’s free” approach, you know, like drug dealers do.

Speaking to GameInformer DeLong said: “Games are getting more expensive, and times are tough, and it’s getting harder to purchase every game you want. So, how can we keep people playing and offer them more but not have to make them break the bank to do it?”

The answer it seems is to use the power of the internet to claw back sales. £40/$60 is a lot of money to shell out all at once, and I haven’t personally done that in quite a while (thank you trade-ins) so cheaper games in the store are always a good thing.

Read more →

GAME might be the largest videogame retailer in the UK, but that doesn’t mean much if no one is buying. The company’s sales have dropped 13.9% in the past 18 weeks, with games like Modern Warfare 2 and FIFA 10 failing to bring in the cash. Peter Lewis, chairman of GAME, blamed falls in both hardware and software sales:

Recent console price cuts from Sony and Microsoft have increased demand, though revenues from increased unit sales of these formats have not offset the overall fall in hardware revenues.

There have been a number of major software releases including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and FIFA 10, which both broke records in their first week of launch. However, the exceptionally strong performance of these titles was in part offset by softer than expected sales of some other releases.

It’s interesting that Lewis picks out these titles, as both games were heavily discounted by the supermarkets, and GAME probably lost quite a few sales to the likes of Sainsburys and Tesco.

Read more →

The price of videogames in the UK is always a sticky topic. If we’re not being charged 50% too much, the retailers are ripping chunks out of each other in a desperate struggle for our attention.

One of the most recent examples of this was Asda selling FIFA 10 for less than £30. Talking to MCV Asda’s games category manager, Duncan Cross, said this wasn’t his company, and other supermarkets, working with publishers to lower the price. Instead he insisted that they simply sold the game at a loss in some extreme undercutting attempts.

This defensive stance comes, as MCV say, after comments by Konami’s UK general manager, Pete Stone, who said these low prices were “unnecessary and worrying”.

Still, cheap games is cheap games.