Sometimes Amazon doesn’t add the 20% off to the listing until a few weeks before launch. That’s probably what you’re seeing.
You missed out on a great opportunity. The war just ended. It was rough but very successful for me.
true which is annoying but sometimes they dont give the discount if its a collectors edition or if the game is super cheap at release
well that makes some since, bb could save money not storing and shipping games if they outsource to amazon, like wises they may start a store on amazon to save money and resources
I agree 100% with you. I won't stop shopping at Best Buy but I guaranty my elite plus goes away and my day 1 game purchases drop significantly!
I'm of the opinion that "Key only" physical packaging (like for most B&M retail PC games) are mainly there so grandma can buy her little darling Witcher 3 for Christmas. There's still a lot of people for whom buying a digital game, much less as a gift, would be a confusing experience and those empty plastic clam shells make it much easier. I suspect that eventually though they'll transition to just plastic cards like the game time and microtransaction cards they sell and even the faux-clam shell packages with be a thing of the past.
If it were just about money, I think they would have simply raised the price. Maybe they still might but if they had the intentions of doing so, I'd think they would have announced those plans instead of alienating their customers.
GCU was originally $120 for 2 years and even then it was a steal. I probably buy around 50 or so new games annually, give or take, and absolutely saved hundreds of dollars a year by having GCU. The thing with video games though is that they don't have much of a profit margin to begin with, usually around $12-$15 which Best Buy was eating with GCU and that's with new releases at full MSRP. When a game goes on sale they are already taking a loss on it and an additional 20% off when a large bulk of your sales are to GCU members I can imagine they were just taking a bath on a lot of video game sales.
Physical packaging takes up room on a shelf. If it's not selling, you need to get rid of it via discounts. Digital doesn't have that problem.
Gaming/Entertainment is 9% of revenues at BBY. Feb 2017-2018 Gaming (this includes hardware and software) was the largest sales gain % of ALL categories. You can make your own decision if you think shareholders will find it significant.
Just to clarify, 99% of the time retailers are NOT taking a loss on games when they run them on sale. Most sales are negotiated with the manufacturer so they are given a break on the title during the week of the sale, thus allowing them to still make a profit. The discount comes out of both sides. There are rare exceptions where the store does it despite not being able to negotiate a discount as a loss leader but that's certainly the exception. Now clearance is another matter, that's usually coming out of the store's end.
Except the vast majority of that likely came from people who didn't have GCU and will continue shopping like they always did. It's been well established that they were making virtually nothing on GCU sales, which means no revenue.
It is revenue (total sales/top line) I think you meant Earnings/profit (bottom line). A company like Best Buy have number crunchers who have ran the numbers to see if it is worth it to keep this program both on total sales/revenue and also earnings/profit with the risk of losing customers. Who knows their goal of the program in the first place maybe to discount game software to lure game hardware purchases.
I think the argument that this entire concept makes is "$60 is too much for a video game". It's the same thing the music industry went through in the Napster days. When you're trying to charge $20 for a CD and sales are just dwindling and dwindling, the problem isn't the consumers. I get that games are expensive to make and many of them are financial failures...but being so shortsighted and not acknowledging that selling to more people at lower prices creates more profit than selling to less people at higher prices is just poor business sense (ie. 100 people buying a $48 game makes more profit than 75 people buying a $60 game).
I honestly see them just letting most of the memberships ride out. I'd be more worried if mine wasn't up in the Fall. I imagine that sometime next year is when they will make some changes for the remaining members, but I don't think the 20% discount will go away. I could see the discount being restricted to pre-orders/new releases though similar to how Amazon has done it.
That could very well be the goal. Reduce the scale of video game operations. They are spending wayyy too much money, manpower, and resources in order to distribute, ship, and sell games at little to no profit. Think of the millions of packages GCU results in, each year.
But if you're the business who is buying the game wholesale for $45 then you're talking $300 from a hundred people versus $1,125 from the seventy-five or even $750 from fifty people. "We'll make it up in volume" has its limits.
ROFLthey literally CAN DO it. They would be met with a lot of negativity and horrendous media/publicity but they can
I dunno, I think with GCU you were only allowed to buy so many copies of the same game per account anyway. How did you have trouble ordering games that were on sale before they sold out too? I've rarely had issues ordering online for in-store pick up when I see a game I want at Best Buy.YO, rich and all members who joined AFTER 2013....this is your exit invitation.....PLEASE get lost and leave CAG to the real CAG
I doubt ANYONE protesting with that much zeal, besides being a gamestop employee lol, EVER POSTS DEALS!
Seriously, take a look, anyone who’s member number ends in 14 and is mad about this, i bet has NO deals posted
I’m SO HAPPY GCU is over, so now those of us who spend hours scouring the internet for deals and then taking the time to post to our community can now be assured there still will be copies left of any said deal/game before someone swoops in to buy 25 copies, and then CL/eBay flip, this isn’t CAG FLIP, its just CAG
So Bye GameStop/lCrybabies
Now the deal hunting will be left to the real men! Lol
God bless Americathey literally CAN DO it. They would be met with a lot of negativity and horrendous media/publicity but they can
I beleive they’ll offer a ONE TIME concession to anyone who’s membership goes past 2019, but for people who have it into 2023 or past, they will undoubtedly block it at some point
Question is , in what form will this recompense manifest
Best Buy is always looking for a way to stay profitable and media like video games and movies aren't it especially in today's climate with digital marketplaces continuing to grow year over year. Appliances have a nice profit margin and Best Buy has become one of the top retailers for appliances in the U.S. with H.H. Greg going out of business.
You are not wrong. Not sure how I missed those numbers...different perspective, I guess. If they're making $15 per game sold as opposed to $3 per game sold, they only need to retain 20% of those sales to break even...which again, seems feasible. So, in terms of profit margin, there's nothing wrong with that. But I also can't imagine they'd want to lose 80% of their customer base (though I don't think it'll be that high). My guess is the numbers will fall somewhere in the middle. They'll lose a decent amount of sales, but could end up being more profitable (at least until they stop selling games entirely). Hard to know what effect that will have on other departments of the store.
There is speculation and there is intuition. I share your concern for the former. I lament your lack of ability or willingness to embrace the latter.actually no, it's clickbait news that is nothing but editorial, not unlike anything else that has been posted in this thread. It has no informing facts whatsoever outside of stating that the program has been cancelled. In fact, it gets several things WRONG.
The firsting sentence is incorrect. People are still getting their 20% discount if they have a current membership. Then it proceeds to restate the memo that we all had in the first place, in the very first post in this thread. Then the rest of the article is bullshit speculation. "...the program struggled to gain traction after game pre-order savings were also offered through competitive services like Amazon Prime." What the
The fact that people these days can't separate factual news from opinion is alarming. That if they read something from a site they have heard of before then it is to be taken as the truth, even when no facts or sources are cited. Current English and composition teachers must be failing in the internet era and old ones are rolling over in their graves.
Real talk - I've never understood this.Games aren't for playing. They are for filling shelves.
