What say you PC gamers? Is this some bullshit or what? Is it even legal for a business to open a product between the manufacturer and customer without notifying said customer of the missing item?
I think this is going to turn into a PR nightmare for Gamestop and is probably going to be a big black eye for when they try to launch their own game streaming service.
It’s terrible bullshit. I have never been a big fan of the store and now I have yet another reason to find them reprehensible.
How hard would it have been to set up a deal with the publisher were they get copies of the game sans the coupon? Opening the shrinkwrap and taking out the game is just wrong and close to impossible to defend.
I am far from someone who will jump to the defense of corporations and I think how they handled it was BS but I can kind of understand where they are coming from.
Let’s say Starbucks sold CDs and found out inside was were coupons for free Dunkin Donuts Coffee, the would probably ask the supplier to give them copies without the coupon.
Tearing open packages and selling them as new is stupid. They should have held this product and waited for product that didn’t have the item in question.
What sucks is I was going to go out tomorrow to buy this and one of my stores to try was a Gamestop…oh well.
The news here isn’t that Gamestop removed an OnLive code. It’s that Gamestop is selling PC games again.
Sounds like that they are not just taking the free game codes, but that their employees may be distributing them elsewhere.
Gamestop would have been well within their rights to send everything back to SquareEnix and demand a version of the game sans coupon. But they didn’t want to miss launch day and so decided to tamper with the product. Not cool, Gamestop.
It’s not like Gamestop was ethical to begin with.
Opening new PC game boxes is SOP there. You hear way too many reports about people purchasing “new” PC games that turn out to have been opened and/or used. The usual excuse is that the “new” game purchased was an unused display copy (and even this claim is usually very easily disproven).
The employees are under huge pressure to just sell. Gamestop has a bad habit of pushing pre-orders so they don’t have to carry extra stock. It leads to re-wrapping barely used games as new. It’s often only the AAA premium titles where you might be able to find a copy in the first place. For niche games, stores are often only sent enough copies to fill pre-orders.
At this point, I’m not sure why people buy new games from a Gamestop. You can usually find new games cheaper at a big box store (any town with a Gamestop probably has a Best Buy or Wal-Mart near by) or online. And availability is rarely a problem.
Apparently they’re sending copies back to Squeenix now.
I don’t think Gamestop will be hurting by the bad press, though. I went in on Sunday and had to dump my purchase because I didn’t want to stand in the stupidly long checkout line. They were used games for $25 each I can buy new for $30, anyway, and I’d rather some of that cost went back to the developers rather than it all going straight into Gamestop’s pocket, particularly after this news.
They’ve never stopped selling PC games. Though, except for brand new blockbusters they tend to be the couple of shelves near the used games rack.
But that’s what happens when an entire platform goes 75% digital and the biggest retail purchases are in Europe/Asia, and int he states through online retailers like Amazon.
Also, I’m guessing there is language in their distribution contract that requires the publisher to let them know if a competitor is begin promoted, or outright saying that no such thing will be distributed.
In fact, it looks like the publisher is in fact saying that is the case and is sending out new versions of the game, minus the coupon, to Gamestop.
In the meantime, Gamestop, has removed the PC version fo the game from it’s shelves.
Isn’t this fraud? If I read online that a game is going to have a coupon in it, and I say “Cool, I’m going to buy that game”, and then when I buy the game it doesn’t have the coupon, that means that what I’m buying is not what I was told I was buying. If they want to sell copies of the game without the coupon, they should at least be required to put a notice on the box or something.
According to one article I read, since the coupon isn’t advertised on the box as an included feature, removing it isn’t fraud or theft on GameStop’s part. It may violate some agreement with the publisher but there’s little recourse for the consumer aside from doing your shopping somewhere else from now on.
Even if it’s corporate policy, selling opened items as “new” may run afoul of some laws.
Actually, it looks like they’re already in a bit of trouble over selling opened items as new. This latest news can’t help their public image much.
I don’t see why it would. So long as you have to option to say “no, I’m not buying that” and shopping elsewhere, anyway.
Not saying I support what they’re doing, not at all, I just find it hilarious how badly a lot of people (not anyone here specifically, just in the general internet) are overreacting to it. Don’t like it, don’t shop there.
Not just PC games. Gamestop (with good reason) doesn’t like to put actual game product on the floor. They’re too cheap to get cover art and box blanks to advertise their games that way (like they do in the weeks leading up to a game’s release): We would gut new games and display the cases on the walls that way. So we might have twenty new copies of Band of Turismo Theft Auto of Duty XIV behind the counter, sixteen unopened copies and four gutted copies. Once we’re down to those last four copies we’d go out to the wall, take the “new” case down, slip the disk inside and then seal it with what we called “bubble tape” (those circular tape strips) so that we could be sure they hadn’t been opened if the customer attempted a return (they left sticky shit all over those “new” copies when opened unless opened very carefully).
If you go around the counter there’s like three or four white bins of “new” game disks (more or less depending on the size of the store).
Not to mention that employees are allowed game checkouts. If there aren’t any used copies available, or if there is only one or two used copies available, we’d check out new games.
So your “new” copies might have literally been played at some employee’s home (though it’s unlikely).
You don’t see why misrepresenting merchandise might be unlawful?
But you don’t have that option.
Gamestop employee takes the game open. Opens the shrinkwrap, plugs the disc in, has a fun old time. Along the way he accidentally scratches it. Not wanting to get in trouble or have to pay for it, he repackages the disc, throws some new shrinkwrap on it, and sells it as new.
I see the box on the shelf. Even if there are Used copies already available, I specifically want a New one. I pay the full price for the game, expecting that I have a pristine copy. I get home, load the game up over the weekend, and discover it has a scratch that makes it unplayable. I take it back to the store, but their return policy is structured so I’m screwed unless they feel charitable enough to give me an unblemished disc. Either way they’re not giving me my money back.
You can’t say no to an individual product in that case, because they are lying to you about the quality of the product. I don’t see that it’s unreasonable to think that that might well fall under fraud law.
Whereas, if they labeled the used games as new, you’d have the option of saying “Hm, they only have used copies left. I don’t want a used copy, so I’ll try a different store.”.
Not too long ago new copies of every game were checked out by employees, played for a few days, and then repackaged and sold as new. Normally an employee would only get to check out a used copy of the game, but there generally aren’t any used copies of a new release for a few days (unless we went into business with the “entrepreneurs” who would trade in obviously stolen games on release day for cash). Depending on how big the release was, it may be that every new copy in the store was played and repackaged.
Don’t know if those policies have changed in the last four or five years though.
They haven’t. See my last post.
My manager at the time even did this with games with Keys like PC games. I know he did it with Spore.