I’m glad GAME is going away as buying games digitally is better than physical – Reader’s Feature

As GAME enters administration for the second time, a reader does not regret its absence from the high street and argues digital downloads are preferable to physical games.

I doubt anyone spared a tear for GAME this week. They’re not dead yet but they’ve clearly got more than one foot in the grave, since all that’s left of it now is the website and those little booths in Sports Direct. GAME isn’t a sympathetic victim in all this because when they had all the power they were expensive, offered very bad trade-in deals, and never had any stock of anything but the most vanilla, mainstream games.

But what can you expect? They were a big nationwide company with a virtual monopoly (almost a literal one once they bought Gamestation) and their business was primarily selling games to non-gamers and casuals who only cared about Call Of Duty and FIFA.

No one at GAME (usually including the people at the till) cared about video games, they were just running a business and made no effort to do anything than put boxes on shelves and a new poster in the window when a new game come out. I’m sorry for the people that lose their job but I’m sure they predicted this was going to happen as much as everyone else did.

In a sense it doesn’t really matter what happened this week, because GAME has been irrelevant for years. I doubt the website even does that well anymore, since there’s no point using that over Amazon. More importantly, digital overtook physical sales ages ago, on everything but Nintendo at least, so this is just hammering one of the last nails into the coffin.

I know everyone says that’s a bad thing, but I really don’t see it that way. Sure, making it harder to trade-in games isn’t good but there’s still CeX if you want to and they’re in pretty much every town now, just like GAME was in their heyday.

Beyond that the benefits of physical become really suspect. I agree with the argument that it’s best to have the whole game on a disc, because otherwise you don’t really own it, but almost no game runs off a disc without massive additional downloads, and that’s been the case since at least the last generation. It might be playable from the disc but it’s never complete.

I find the argument that you get better sales to be wrong too, as digital sales are often much better than anything you get in a store. The only exception is on day one but then it’s never been a good idea to buy a game that early on. It’s a shame you can’t get a coupon or some kind of club card to do something about that, but as far as I’m concerned it’s the only flaw and balances itself out over time anyway, with the better sales, since day one games were never that cheap for physical either.

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People laugh at the benefits of digital being that it’s more convenient but why is that? Nowadays I’ve got a dozen or more different games at my fingertips at any time and if I want a new one I can buy it instantly. And I know publishers aren’t the greatest but I’d still 100% of my money go to them than half of it going to a shop like GAME.

At least that way more of it might get pumped back into game development and if it’s an indie game it definitely will. So I really don’t see how digital isn’t better than physical and I don’t see the end of GAME as a bad thing at all.

I’ve loved gaming since I was a kid, so GAME should’ve been my favourite place to be. Instead, it always seemed very clinical and corporate and I never felt it was never a good advertisement for gaming, since it’s all some people would have ever seen of it. It won’t be missed by me.

By reader Gannet

The reader’s features do not necessarily represent the views of GameCentral or Metro.

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