You work at two jobs... both at Best Buy?  That's just... I don't even know.

Usually distribution center guys get paid better then floor employees.  I know where I worked retail wise distribution guys got paid an extra 2 dollars and had chances for overtime.

What I meant to say was, why PSP sales were selling so high.  As in... people buying them for piracy vs people buying them to buy games but everyone suddenly finding out about piracy and then pirating games.   

I'm not going to comment on salary-wise, Nature of the job determines the pay.

And feel free to read what other people who have worked at retail stores have to say.

Since real expert here is too busy to contribute to the topic, am I right? fkusumot

I use to work toys r us not long enough to know the inner workings though. but i will say as a manager at a pizza place we got barely anything selling pizza.

Well the 10 K filing are tough to sort out. I believe most companies make it a point to list video game sales along with video and CD sales.

Best Buy could just have a really poor negotiation on games.

Wal-mart makes a pretty healthy proft on games for example. Or at least they did during the PS2 era. Of course that's because they can negotiatie the biggest costs.

They also make a 500% markup on those little plastic balls that are in the big holder crates in the center of toy isles. Those things are profit margin heaven.  If you ever wondered why they were there when like no one buys them.  1 sale pretty much pays for it. 

Still, unless your working high up in the company you at best are going to know regional profitability and not overall profitability of products.

i will say this for toys r us no discount for consoles 6 dollars off games. (pizza place gave 20-50 % off for employees.)

Just to make sure everyone understands. Costco makes money off of everything it sells unless the item is marked down or something crazy happens. Sometimes crazy things happen. My store stopped selling gas for a while because the store GM thought there was too little profit to be made in gas for those few days.

When Costco sells SSBB and SMG for $44, Costco is making money. When it sells Winter Sports, Sonic and the Secret Rings, and FF12 for $16, it is making money. When it sells consoles plus game bundles for $5 less than they would cost if not bundled, Costco is making money. If Costco doesn't think it can make money off something, it doesn't sell them. That is why Costco doesn't really deal with PSP or PSP products.

I highly doubt other retailers are different. I know some retails make tons of money by charging more. Gamestop charged $25 ($5 extra) for the Wii Zapper and ToysRUs charges $22 ($2 extra) for 2000 Wii points.

The margins on extras are highest and the margins tend to be the lowest on new consoles. Nevertheless, unless the retailer is doing great in other areas and thinking about the big picture or someone super strange happens, retails make money on games. Gamestop is making money hand over fist on everything right now because it plans on opening a ton of new stores this year.

This thread has gone so far off-topic.

I would highly doubt the fact that retailers makes almost no money of games.

One example :
During the month of January Best Buy had many sales where they dropped the price of a specific game by 20$ for a week before raising it back to the usual price the following weeks.

One week it was Assassin Creed ( which had just come out and wasn't discounted by Ubisoft), another Ninja Gaiden Sigma, I saw CoD4 off 20$ at Amazon for a week too. So all of those games were at 39.99$ for a week.

And I would highly doubt best Buy would sell any game at a loss even during a week sales event so you have to assume they make at least 20$ of profit on full priced 60$ PS3 games ( same for Xbox360 I will assume). And actually I would even expect them to make a little more than that because it would make no sense to sell games like Assassin Creed that were flying off the shelves at the time without making any profit at all...

So if I had to guess I would say they make 25$ or so per game.

Gamestop makes more because they will typically buy your game at 20$ and resell them at 55$. So they make like 35$ per used game and they don't even have to store those games in big warehouses and get them shipped to the store, reducing even more their costs, translating in the end to close to double profit on used games compared to new games...

PS : It's funny how King of Wales claims big electronics retailers make no profit from games where one of the reasons advanced in Best Buy latest financial report for their increased revenue was strong growth in the video games/entertainment sector.

You can find their whole report here : http://media.corporate-ir.net/media_files/irol/83/83192/bby_3q08_ER.pdf

Basically what it says is that Q3 2007 vs Q3 2006 ( their Q3 ends December 1st) their earning per share increased by 71% and the sector which experimented more growth was entertainment software. They mention Video gaming hardware as one factor limiting profit growth, BUT NEVER SOFTWARE.

You'd be wrong to doubt it, Ail, and so is everyone else. While the retailers can take as much as 20% of the cost of a new game, that's not enough to cover opperating expenses. If it were, GameStop would carry new games instead of forcing people into this "preorder or forget it" mentality they like, and they wouldn't be so focused on selling you their off-brand memory cards, magazine subscriptions, and the almighty used game. They do get massive markups in some of those areas, and it's by selling $20 memory cards at $50 and $40 controllers at $60 along with $10 trade-ins for $25 that they make their money. Or, if they are a big box (say, BestBuy), they make it by selling other stuff, such as a nice, new HDTV to go with that PS3/360.