| darkknightkryta said: There was a bit more; the idea behind the family sharing plan. If what that supposed employee of MS was saying is true, then sharing games sent you to the game's page on the Live Store. This apparently, is what cause Gamestop to say "FU" to MS. Trying to control the used game segment, and then try to take away new sales, Gamestop didn't like that one bit. Apparently BenVTrigger was hinting that this was the case on top of the low pre-orders, when the situation occured. He hasn't logged in in a while and I'm not sure if he's allowed to verify it. He did mention about Gamestop killing pre-orders to us though. |
Well, without benV to confirm, it's hard to figure out exactly what the cause was. I did read all his posts during the time, and nothing was really hinting at what the reasoning could be.
That being said, I do think you theory could be part of the puzzle, but allow me to also provide you with some corner pieces.
1. The system for trading in used games required the integration of the windows azure cloud platform into the gamestop functionality. While some members here swore that it must have been free for "trusted partners" (ironic, since gamestop was not to be trusted lol), the very fact that they'd have to alter their entire POS to accomodate for a new network could have been, at the least a hassle, and at the most, costly..not to mention that it's an online database, not an in-store one...which they currently use.
2. The trade in system took a piece of the pie, gave it to devs, and took another slice and gave it to microsoft (for whatever reason) and it also set trade in prices. That's not just revenue they're controlling, it's everything.
3. Two part:
a) The family share as explained by MS reps said you could share unlimited with 10 people. If that isn't a big middle finger to gamestop I dunno what is. That being said, it's hard to believe MS would part with 90% of sales. Just looking at the ps3 share program with 3 copies for friends, was quickly axed in order to fix revenue.
b) The share program as explained by the anonymous AMA program only allowed timed demos. This wouldn't have been a big deal, but like you said, it did direct them to purchase digitally, which might have been a problem for gamestop.
4. The console itself. We heard no details regarding trade-ins and how they could be returned or fixed for that matter.
Now, another thing we know is that the digital program would have given gamestop a pretty big share of reseller market. With mom and pop shops unable to integrate with azure, and ebay and amazon basically untrustworthy for resale, gamestop would've seen significantly more traffic.
What we can deduce here, is that the extra profits from this additional traffic was offset by the downsides, and likely by a large amount. Breaking even wouldn't have been such a concern as to stop pre-orders.
We can't really theorize as to what this variable income would have been, but if we were able to, it could help pinpoint exactly where the problem stemmed from.
I could theorize that the added traffic at lower margins could have played a part, necessitating higher overhead for more workers and upgrades, as well as the loss of freedom to price how they wanted ultimately decided the change of course. Without the azure system, the whole strategy is kaput. It makes a lot of sense then, why MS took away virtually everything they were offering when all us consumers were simply saying "just remove these parts". Obviously, you can't remove parts of it piecemeal if the core system is missing.
