I was in gametsop yesterday and I asked the guy if they had and online pass for madden 11 (gamestop has add on cards etc at the store) and he said that EA was hurting their used sales due to the whole online pass. He said more people are buying the games new and they are kinda getting stuck with the used ones. When gamestop sells a used game it is normally 5 bucks cheaper than the new version (at first release and a few months after) and If you buy used then you have to buy the pass which makes the used version more expensive than the new by like 5 dollars. It may not be alot of money to some but 5 dollars gets me to work and and back lol. Anyway, does anyone have any official news on this? I just thought it was worth mentioning.

Oh and if your wondering why I was buying a pass, it wasn't for me and I refuse to put my cc info on someone else's ps3.

Eh maybe it does on us a little bit but nothing too serious.  We do sell the online passes and some people do buy them.  The thing is the pre-owned games are only $5 cheaper for maybe the first 3 weeks or so then its usually about $10 - $15 dollars cheaper, plus with a power up rewards card you get and extra 10% off that.  I would say it might have affected us about 8 - 10 percent in terms of pre-owned EA titles but nothing too drastic.

I would be surprised if a significant amount of Gamestop's used business came through the yearly EA Sports titles, just because they're games with a short short shelf life (once the corresponding season is over, what's the point?)

They should put backend pressure on EA by threatening to refuse to stock some of the new IPs EA's trying so desperately to get off the ground, though. If i were Gamestop, that's what i'd do.

We don't really need to threaten EA though because they are easily one of our biggest advertisers.  That's the thing many don't get is that we have fantastic relationships with pretty much all of developers and publishers.  Any amount of money we would have lost from the EA codes is easily made up in their paid in store advertising.  All in all it works out fine.

Hey buddy, I got a pickle to pick with you! I went to EB the other day and asked them to price match a deal from GAME, they told me to piss off and chucked a random copy of Madden 07 at me. Whatchu guys doin? First you say that everything except for console deals can be price matched, but then you stop me from trading in my copy of Sega Super Star Tennis and Viva Pinata and get a $5 credit addition to my trade in. Now I'm stuck with a $30 voucher at GAME, but GAME has no games and everything else is overpriced. 

Also, I wanted a price match on Nier for $26 from another store, but EB wouldn't match it because they were charging $110 for it (don't know why) and they said they'd lose money or something by going along with my commands. Buddy, you guys been making promised you can't keep and I expect a $10 voucher sent to my house by next Thursday. We cool?

Hmm.  Sorry unfortunalty on this one I can't be too much help.  Even though we do own EB Games were run as two seperate stores and I work for the Gamestop branch.  I'm not entirely sure how exactly EB handles price matches and such but I know at Gamestop we don't price match at all anymore.  We used to but now days we just run our own deals.  So I know thats not quite the answer your looking for but I don't know too much about the EB side of the company.

As to your trade in problem, we are currently offering a trade in bonus of 50% until the first week of march.  So if you have anything lieing around now is the time to trade it in.  Basically if a game your trading in is worth normally $20 you'll get the extra 50% and it'll be worth $30 instead.  This applies to all games too.  Anyways sorry I couldn't be of much more help. But if EB is saying they'll do price matches and not honoring it, thats pretty lame.

BenVTrigger is all business, all the time.