Hello, I’m a gamer. And like every overgrown kid I like to get the occasional new/exciting game as soon as it comes out, so I keep an eye on release dates and such on the internets (often with aid of “the google”).
Any game of note these days will have a release date, typically a Tuesday. If it’s a big title (like Final Fantasy, Halo, etc), it’ll usually be in the stores that Tuesday. Otherwise, it seems like they ship on Tuesday and arrive in stores that week.
My confusion concerns the bigger titles that ship early in order to be ready for launch in the stores on a certain date. Recent examples are Final Fantasy XII (10/31) and Guitar Hero II (11/7). In both cases, there were reports on various gaming blogs about different retailers inadvertantly shelving the games early, thus violating the street date. Here’s where my question comes in. I’ve heard various theories about what happens next, but I’ve never actually seen these things happen.
1)** A retailer that violates the street date is fined for each copy sold.** I’ve heard all manner of amounts for this supposed fine, but have never actually seen any hard evidence that it happens. Surely, if a company like CompUSA (which supposedly briefly stocked FFXII early) was fined thousands of dollars for this kind of violation, there’d be a news story out there somewhere. I’ve done my best with the google and all I can find are people talking about “OMG they’re going to get fined.” Nothing official.
**Once a retailer breaks street date, anyone else is free to sell the game now without repercussion. ** Supposedly we should see a free for all whenever some store somewhere sells a game early. I’m confident that we can put this one in the myth column. I have never in my life seen it happen, but I continue to see someone mention it every single time a game is sold early somewhere.
So where do these ideas come from? Is there any reason to believe either notion is grounded in reality at all?
Working for a big retailer for a number of years this is how I’ve seen it go down.
CDs, DVDs, and games are typically released on Tuesdays. Companies ship boxes of these new titles so the stores receive them with their UPS/Fedex shipments typically Monday mornings. The boxes they come in are usually stamped “Do Not Display Until 11-7-06!”.
Because there are so many retailers across the country and most have $8/hr employees in charge of this there are bound to be some screw ups. I used to find new releases all the time on Mondays at a K-Mart in a rough part of town.
Unless there is an uproar over it, or it attracts big attention, it probably goes by unnoticed.
Where I worked the people at the corporate offices could type in the UPC for a title and see if any were sold on that Monday. If there were any sold out of your store you could expect a call and get chewed out.
The only time I heard of actual fines beign imposed was by Buena Vista Media (Disney). They got proof that a store had released product early and fined them per copy sold. We were notified via company memo and warned “don’t let this happen to you!”
Hmm. Different country and different rules, but I once bought a game from at a Japanese game store before its release date. The owner told me (before money changed hands) that because it was before the release date he wouldn’t give me a receipt (presumably to prevent documentation of the sale). So in Japan at least there seems to be some kind of penalty involved. Personally, I would be surprised if American retailers were fined for breaking the street date; having producers refuse to ship games early to repeat offenders seems more likely to me.
To me this is akin to selling your product to dealers and telling them that they must sell it for at least $x.xx. There’s no law that forces the dealers to obey, but of course you can stop selling to the dealer if they don’t follow your conditions.
Worked in management for Blockbuster Video, and my experience is similar to Hampshire’s. Street date violations are taken very seriously, mostly because if it’s a repeated offense, the studio will refuse to preship future orders. If they won’t ship me a new release until the day it releases, I don’t get it in my store and on the shelves until several days after everyone else - possibly even after that first critical weekend. Those first few days may not seem like much, but it’s a huge percentage of the total revenue on that title - even more so for games than movies. (Gamers want their games right away, not when they’re “old”.) Once the gamers realize that they can’t get new stuff right away, they’ll go somewhere else the first time for the next release.
Some of the asshole managers of other stores would go to the mom ‘n’ pops and *look *for street date violations to report. The District Managers loved this shit, but I never played that game. Frankly, they could only order a couple of copies anyway, and I’d beat them in volume regardless of their violations. I figured they needed every dollar they can get before Blockbuster drives them out of business anyway.
Oh, and #2 is most emphatically NOT TRUE, and sort of akin to the college “rule” that if the professor is 10 minutes late, everyone can leave with no penalty for the day. Total bullshit, but believed by a lot of people. Story drove me nuts every time I had to explain to an employee that they couldn’t break street date just because they saw a title elsewhere.