This past summer, I was given the opportunity to visit the home of Handsome Phantom producer Dustin Furman. Hidden within his quaint Pennsylvania home was something amazing. It’s the sort of thing I’ve never seen in person before – only in pictures online or in gaming magazines when I was younger. This breathtaking sight to behold – which literally stopped me in my tracks when I first saw it – was an awe inspiring collection of video games. Dustin’s entire back wall of the living room was teemed with shelves holding cartridges, cases, and discs. Flanked by an impressive collection of records, comic books and Amiibo’s, this archive of the last 30 years in gaming ranged from original NES cartridges all the way to the latest releases for Playstation 4 and Nintendo Switch (Dustin has just recently bolstered his collection with a pretty impressive find of Super Nintendo games, including a genuine Chrono Trigger cartridge – you can hear more about that here). The wall of history was probably only about seven or eight feet high, but it felt like it was at least twenty as I stood speechless gazing at all his treasures. As I reflect on how amazing it all was and yearn over having my own collection someday, I fear with the way our industry is going that this is the type of collection that will slowly have fade to memory and become extinct.
News broke earlier this week that Gamestop has two possible suitors to purchase the company. According to these reports, the deal could be officially announced as early as next month. These are still rumors and it’s difficult to ascertain exactly what this could mean for the future of the video game retail giant. However, if I were part of the brass at the company’s headquarters, I’d get out as quickly as I can. Gamestop once had what felt like a monopoly on the video game retail industry. Smaller mom and pop video game stores were shuttering constantly in the wake of Gamestop’s near impossible to compete against rewards programs, trade system, numerous locations, and midnight openings for the biggest titles. It seemed to be at it’s last highest point in the fall of 2013 when shares of the company were going for upwards of $50 USD. But things have changed. Shares are currently trading in and around $15 a share. Fierce competition from digital retailers like Steam, The Playstation Store, and publisher’s own online storefronts, like the Ubisoft Store, have made having to leave your house to pick up your most sought after titles on launch all but redundant. I really hope I’m wrong, but it certainly feels like Gamestop is going the way of Blockbuster Video.
Until recently, I was one of the biggest defenders of buying physical. For me, the biggest selling point on being a brick and mortar customer is being able to recycle and sell back my game for store credit after I was done with it. Here in Canada, our EB Games stores (owned by Gamestop) offer a promotion where if you trade any three games over a certain trade value, you can get any new release free of charge – this is a promotion I’ve taken advantage of more times than I can count. Furthermore traditional retailers will have something that digital retailers will never have – a massive collection of previously played games at reduced prices. I know other gamers who share similar loyalties to physical purchases but for different reasons. Some seek to build monstrous collections like Dustin’s. Some prefer to pay with cash and still don’t trust giving their credit card information over to a website. Others just have a weird infatuation with opening a game for the first time and rubbing the brand new plastic of the case against their smooth, smooth skin. Whatever weird reason it is, it’s not easy to make the switch to purchasing digital video games. But I’ve taken the plunge, at least partially, and have a hard time seeing myself stopping.
I’m going to focus on the Playstation Store here. This is the digital retailer that I’ve had the most experience with, followed closely by Steam. To put their digital growth in perspective, Playstation Store purchases accounted for over 30% of full game sales in 2017, up from 15% in 2015. But looking at just myself, the main reason why Gamestop has lost so many of my hard earned dollars to digital purchases over the last year is impulsivity. The ease and convenience of purchasing from the comfort my couch has been, in most cases, too much to pass up. I don’t have to leave my house and, more importantly, I don’t have the time to have second thoughts about the purchase or think about other expenses. I just buy.
The second biggest reason is storage. For the first three and a half years of owning my Playstation 4, I stuck with the standard 500GB internal hard drive and nothing else. When I was finished with a game, I would sell it back to Gamestop and delete it from my Playstation 4’s internal memory. It wasn’t long before this became a necessity. These games got so large in size that I felt I was constantly deleting old items to make room for the new releases. Luckily, since external storage options have become more readily available and cheaper, I was able to pick up an 2TB SSD for under $100. Suddenly my storage problem is solved and leaving games on the system for as long as I want and revisiting them years after completion was now an option – as are digital purchases. The last major reason why I’ve mostly switched to digital is price. If you don’t take the time to peek in on whatever random holiday or flash sale the Playstation Store is having, you’re really missing out. Not to mention that with Playstation Plus, Sony gifts me two free games every month. Furthermore, prices on digital titles are extremely competitive with physical. In most cases any given game seems to be the same or cheaper than what Gamestop lists them at.
Similar scenarios play out on Steam, or the Xbox Games Store. Subscription type services like Xbox Games Pass change the way you purchase games completely. You no longer even have to buy a game. Rather, a Netflix style monthly fee gives you access to a wide assortment of games old and new. Sticking with Xbox, there are even rumors that Microsoft is hard at work at a new version of the Xbox One (or next Xbox – it’s unclear which) that will come standard without a disc drive. Five years ago this sort of news would have been received similarly bad to when Apple announced the iPhone 10 would have no home button. But in 2019, this console would lose a major hardware component that is largely redundant and thus can be sold at a much lower price. This makes moving to digital only that much more attractive for everyone.
All this makes me wonder how storage will be handled in the future. Without a physical disc for data to live on, players will have no choice but to let their digital library build up on their console’s storage. While you do have the option to delete a title you’ve previously purchased and re-download it when you want to play it again, this is an annoyance that many will complain about. Both the Playstation 4 and Xbox One launched with standard 500GB capacities. 1TB and 2TB models have since been added. But what will the vanilla launch consoles of the next generation look like? With the drive for digital distribution pushing Sony and Microsoft’s profit margins even further and game sizes only getting larger, we’d have to assume it would be at least 2TB, or a larger emphasis put on cloud storage.
Sony made its own news earlier this week when it announced that the Playstation 4 has sold 91.6 million units over its five year life cycle. This almost guarantees it will surpass the original Playstation to become the second best selling Sony console in history, and put it within reach of catching the Playstation 2’s over 150 million units shipped. This news also makes it less likely we’ll hear much of anything about Sony’s next generation plans in the next twelve months, meaning many of the above questions will go unanswered for some time. What can be certain is widespread brick and mortar video game stores have their days numbered. Now may be the final opportunity to build up that video game collection that I drooled over at the Furman Estates back in July. Goodbye Gamestop, it’s been great.
Thanks for reading! If you enjoyed this, make sure to check out the HP Podcast from Handsome Phantom! On this week’s show, we played a game themed from this article along with going over the top gaming headlines of the week.
