Too much of a good thing: Mourning the slow death of the retail game store | Hacker News Reader

Too much of a good thing: Mourning the slow death of the retail game store

arstechnica.com

46 pointsindigodaddy74 comments

My very first job was at the Electronics Boutique (now GameStop) at the local mall. I was 15 (too young to be legally hired but corporate turned a blind eye) and worked there the summer of 1999, when Pokémon cards were at their apex, the Dreamcast was about to come out, and the PlayStation was truly at its peak. Aside from some sexual harassment from the cliental for being the only girl who worked there (I was the first female that store had ever even hired and it had been there for 7 or 8 years), it really was such a perfect first job.

We had a policy at the time where people could returned open copies of most games (Microsoft productivity software or anything else with a license key was often an exception), provided it was still in sellable condition and employees got to “check stuff out” for a day or two to test/play at home. As a result, the recommendations we could make were much better and people trusted us and our opinions, which was important when gaming segments on TV were nascent, YouTube didn’t exist, and glossy magazines and the IGN websites were where you would get your game news/reviews.

At least at our mall, we had regulars who lived closer to another location but came to our store because of the staff and because of our selection. I almost never buy games in retail stores these days — buying digitally or buying physical copies online is just more convenient — but it makes me sad that my favorite places as a kid/teenager: video/DVD stores, music stores, video games stores, and toy stores, have all basically gone extinct. At least Best Buy is still a thing, I guess. And the Apple Store. But as convenient as it is to buy stuff online, there is something special about getting to touch/feel/listen/play with stuff before you buy it and something cool about being amongst a community of people as passionate about your interests.

I'm going to date myself but I remember when I was a kid and my Mom took me to a game store. I wanted to get Grand Theft Auto 3 but she wouldn't let me because of the crime, bad violence, drugs, prostitution, etc.

I remember giving one of the workers there massive puppy eyes. I think he absolutely knew my Mom didn't want me playing violent video games without a good reason. He spoke to us and started talking to my mom about other games like Metal Gear Solid 2 "where you fight terrorists" (this was a few months after 9/11) or Red Faction "you get to lead a revolution." He made many statements like this about a few games. As a pre-teen I was able to quench my lust for fabricated violence.

I don't know why I vividly remember this, nearly 20 years ago, but I do. A very short simple conversation that left me a happy kid.

I'm sure you gave many people fond memories.

I still remember a salesperson looking at little old me, then looking at the copy of Unreal Tournament in his hand, then back at me, shrugging, saying "well they're only aliens" and ringing it out.

What I miss about physical games is the full box, the small collectors items inside and reading through the richly illustrated manual.

Ever since games became a disk inside a cheap plastic box buying games in stores lost all magic for me.

I do miss the manuals, particularly the simulation games that had technical references, historical information and stories.

The art-books that came with some games were pretty cool too.

But for the most part, the packaging and pack-ins were just junk. and while I'm still storing a fair amount of it, I haven't played those games in 20 years - I should probably just write down the CD keys and throw everything else away.

There was a flight sim for the Mac (F/A 18, I think) that I played in the mid-90's that came with a thick paperback book. It included all the different flight envelopes and even a primer on the concept of "lift" and how it keeps planes in the air.

The manual included with Microsoft Flight Simulator (4.0 maybe?) in the early 90’s was thick and dense. I remember using it to learn how to navigate using VOR stations. They don’t make them like they used to.

While I do miss these old school boxes and manuals, I also realize, I don't care that much that they are gone?

Don't get me wrong, I loved the Sim City 2000, Civ3, MechWarrior 2 manuals, and countless others, but I also just don't care either, like they were a cool thing... but they were something to read while I took a shit, which isn't saying much.

All of that said, there was a fun nostalgia going into a game store in the mid-90s and being surrounded by boxes of games. I remember Media Play and EB Games were big things here and I bought countless N64 games at both. Before that we also had Toys R'US with its aisles of Genesis and Saturn games.

I heard an interview with Bill Roper (of Blizzard fame back in the day), and he said they included junk on purpose to make the box heavier. If people were choosing between new games A and B, some chose based on which box was heavier as they thought they were getting more for their money.

Blizzard was literally actively marketing its games to imbeciles. I'd love to know how common that type of buying decision gets made and if it carries over to online game buying - Amazon lists the weight of items.

Rockstar Games takes the cake for the best material included with physical copies, every PS2 era game came with a booklet packed with material about the in-game world and GTAs also included a full-size poster and map. Any advertisements or leaflets included were always brilliant parodies that would lead to real sites. I've never seen this level of quality and depth from anyone except Rockstar.

Valiant Video Enterprises Winter/Spring Catalog and Preview Guide https://www.gamesdatabase.org/Media/SYSTEM/Sony_Playstation_...

The companion parody website, password's not needed: http://web.archive.org/web/20070225094519/http://www.valiant...

Can confirm I definitely did this. I mostly associated it with manual size though.

The higher end VoIP phones sometimes have a bar of metal in them to weigh them down.

Sooo many products have this. Sometimes it actually serves a function of keeping the item stable but usually I assume it is for perception of quality.

Couldn't this be for practical reasons, to keep the receiver from moving when you pick up the phone?

Sometimes it is sometimes it’s in the handset itself.

The real good old days before the boxes was bagged games hung up on pegboard behind the counter at the game store or hobby shop. The bags would contain a floppy or two and either a simple backer of card stock or a slim manual, usually with pretty amateur looking artwork. I used to go in to my local store as a kid and salivate at the games like "Fantasyland 2041 A.D." or "Journey to Atlantis" and dream about saving up the money to be able to play them on the family Apple ][+.

>a disk inside a cheap plastic box

The loss of everything but the disk really accelerated my acceptance of digital distribution, especially once the disk only contained yesterday's version of the launcher and you had to download everything once you got it home.

The brick and mortar store never had a chance; the publishers removing all impetus to step inside them was the killing blow.

Yeah, I don’t get why some people cling to buying physical copies of every game when some of them are literally just outdated clients to pull the latest state from a server

Same here. It's just a disc that is usually already outdated on day 1, and many times, has many bugs that were fixed in said day 1 patch.

With video games there's often good reasons to want the disc so you can roll back to the v1.0 before any changes are made. Rockstar Games always adds easter eggs to the disc version that typically get eroded with updates. At least on the PS4 Sony won't let you pick and choose which updates to install for digital copies.

What I don’t miss is the price. Games sold from the cloud tend to be a fraction of the cost just a year after release. The caveat is that you only own a limited license for the game. Still, I prefer the current status quo vs the old days

I'm mainly just depressed at how slow games are now.

There's an official steam version of the Risk boardgame and it spins my fans like crazy. I used to play versions of Risk in the 2000s that barely registered on my 600mhz, 64mb RAM machine.

I am shocked at how things got so slow. It must take a lot of hard work to make a simple game run slowly on modern hardware.

I feel like computer versions of board games are done terribly. I don't want a realistic 3d scene with 30 second animations of each move. I want a 2d (maybe basic 3d for some games, but a view of the board, not a first person view) board, with pretty graphics matching the offline version and excellent multiplayer capability for playing my friends online.

We play on boardgame arena and it’s very minimalist but with good online multiplayer. It all runs in your browser and doesn’t do any fancy processing or rendering

3D can be nice if done well and the animations are good. Monopoly on mobile has good really fast animations and a game can be played in like 30 min against AI. Monopoly on Switch is terrible as you have to watch each literal slow dice roll, piece movement, etc. at normal speed. It takes FOREVER.

I've been playing the digital version of Terraforming Mars recently (as well as the physical copy). I cannot attest to the multiplayer aspect; but the local play against the AI is good and fits your requirements. Worth checking out.

Maybe the problem is that it’s much easier to make a game now than it was back then. But as a result people who maybe don’t really know what they are doing can make games using huge tech stack.

> It must take a lot of hard work to make a simple game run slowly on modern hardware.

The arrogance of this comment is wild.

Risk is built with Unity. Unity games are harder to optimize than older custom engines because it's not custom. Unity and UE allowed games that wouldn't normally exist at all to get made. The complaint "I'm mainly just depressed at how slow games are now" is interesting, in that really you're comparing slow games now to games that would never have existed in the first place before.

Personally, I'll take slow games.

Also, as a general rule, games built on licensed content are mostly just a cash grab/pump and dump system.

> Risk is built with Unity. Unity games are harder to optimize than older custom engines because it's not custom. Unity and UE allowed games that wouldn't normally exist at all to get made. The complaint "I'm mainly just depressed at how slow games are now" is interesting, in that really you're comparing slow games now to games that would never have existed in the first place before.

I really don't understand your argument.

It wasn't viable to emulate a 2d board game on a computer before unity?

You don't understand that lowering the barrier to entry has the side effect of lowering general quality? I'm not sure how to explain it more simply.

Probably mining crypto in the background. Or generating analytic data for ads, which is substantially the same thing.

I remember that Ultima III for the Apple IIe (apart from a fondness for Roman numerals) had a cloth map of Brittania. I remember this because I wanted to start a small business copying the game, and the map, and distributing in repurposed shoe-boxes. The box art was copied by hand and glued on.

Note that I was like 9, and neither myself nor my parents were aware of the (il)legality of this. I also never got further than making my prototype, which objectively sucked, so I never pursued it.

One of my first major creative endeavors was that I wanted to design the successor to SNES. Not like… games. I mean games were my motivation! But hardware was how my brain interfaced with that as a smol.

In perhaps (absolutely) my most commanding leadership role ever, I rallied anyone in earshot to spec out SNES (physical dimensions and inputs, we had no idea what the actual electronics did) and dream bigger.

Obviously I wasn’t creating anything new at the time, but it’s wild how much I look back to that as the moment I started finding my footing.

Upvoted, but I don't get it. What, exactly, were you doing?

Me and a bunch of 7-8 year olds traced the physical contours of an SNES console and then furiously drew our imagined version of what would make games more fun.

Oh I see. So you associated the physicality of the console with it's operation and made new designs based on that. Curiously, that never dawned on me in even though I was really into mechs, which clearly is in the same milieu (that is, superficial design implying physically un-realizable degrees-of-freedom). I think I was entranced by the idea that you could write to both sides of a disk by snipping the floppy just so, and even defeat copy protection in a similar manner. It was all black magic to me, and I enjoyed being the magician at my school. But it would be a lie to claim I understood what I was doing: the primacy of causality would only really sink in during college.

> So you associated the physicality of the console with it's operation and made new designs based on that.

Yes exactly this. I can also say it’s weird that the things I most focused on in those ideas have somewhat become a reality! I was obsessed with multi-screen possibilities, and the idea of games that could be portable and played on a TV. I think my younger vision of multi-screen looked less like the DS style game and more like choose your own angle in adult media. But it’s weird how much physical world shaped how I think about technology so early on.

If it helps: I was strongly discouraged and guided away from actually being a nerd throughout my upbringing. I found my way to nerdy interests and footnotes I’d visit later on my own from creative pursuits that were less discouraged.

The violent anti-nerd sentiment of the 1980s had real life implications for anyone who was into computers or other nerd behavior well into the 90s. I actively avoided any public association with nerd things, only using them secretly and not talking about it with friends. The stereotype radically changed into a cool thing in the late 90s with the hacker becoming the new architype.

Moving forward it's important to remember that mainstream films effectively doomed almost two decades of smart people to either closet nerd behavior or condemnation and ostracization.

For what it’s worth, I experienced far more violence from my peers because I’m neurodivergent than because I’m interested in tech stuff. Even as I grew up through the 80s/90s, there was already a macho bro presence in the nerd world.

Not dismissing your experience at all, but I want to make sure mine is represented accurately.

Most of the harmful attitudes I experienced towards nerds were very socially insular, in my family and among friends.

Perhaps the author never went to a game store that specialized in customer service, or never thought to ask for any. While there are some benefits to a purely digital market place, our current offerings seem to leave this particular part of the business in limbo.

I'm not exactly excited for the middle future we're going to have to get through.

What kind of customer service do you get from a game store? Most of the time your gripes are with nintendo, sony, etc. directly.

Demo units. Demo consoles. Video displays. Staff that knows their inventory and their customers well and can help you find the purchases that will be most valuable to you.

Sure, but those companies do not have brick and mortar stores where they sell inventory. It's always been a distributors market, shouldn't the distributor service you? What else is their cut for?

Demos became obsoleted somewhat by refunds and youtube gameplay. You can buy any game on steam, play it for less than two hours, and if you don't like it, you can refund it. Using the refund process as a trial/demo method is explicitly allowed by valve.

Having a retail person give game recommendations has kind of been obsoleted by youtube and the wider internet. "top 10" lists do a good job of showing you what the hottest stuff in each category is.

Honestly games are so damned cheap these days I don't know why most people (that is, not the desperately poor) would even bother refunding them unless they're completely broken or they're being a dick.

$60 is an expensive AAA game by Steam standards and almost certainly comes with entirely too much content to appease people who think they need a lot of content to justify paying $60.

$60 is also what your average NES game retailed for, which would in today's money be over $200. And most of them were complete garbage.

Most games today that aren't AAA titles, which is to say the actually interesting games, go for a lot less than $60 anyway. A $20 game is the cost of one decent meal out.

I have refunded plenty of games for just not being fun. You are right that they are awesome value if they are good but I don't see why I should pay $20 if I don't feel like I will ever pick up the game again and got less than an hour playtime.

Without refunds I would simply not purchase one unless I was sure it was good value, but with refunds I will buy something based on a few pictures on the store and see if I like it.

I think that falls under the "being a dick" category just a little bit, personally. This isn't donationware, you don't get to only pay if you like the product. There's a description, screenshots, reviews, etc. to determine if you're likely to enjoy the game or not and if you buy it but it just doesn't grab you, I think that's a lot like paying for a sandwich that looks good but turns out is bland and flavorless, it's disappointing sure but I'm not going to demand my money back since I was delivered precisely what was advertised.

Of course, if what they advertise is misleading then that's a different story.

It’s different because it’s a digital product. If you return a sandwich, the product and some human time was wasted. If you refund a game. Nothing was lost. And if people feel free to buy more games knowing they can return the ones they don’t like, it ends up in more sales and more profit.

What logical difference is there between studying the reviews and screenshots over playing the game for 30 minutes and working out yourself if you like it?

> And if people feel free to buy more games knowing they can return the ones they don’t like, it ends up in more sales and more profit.

Actually I don't think that's necessarily true. We tend to be more judgmental of things we get for free than things we had some investment in. By having a "demo-style" return policy you're possibly being more critical of the game than you would be if you had no opportunity to get your money back. Not to mention the scheme's effect on shorter works. You could play all of a one hour game and then decide after the fact it wasn't worth the money. At least one developer has quit game development because of this, which means that there is a pressure to ensure that every game on Steam lasts at least two hours, and that'll probably take the form of having the best stuff locked away until after the two hour mark.

> What logical difference is there between studying the reviews and screenshots over playing the game for 30 minutes and working out yourself if you like it?

I'll admit, I can't meaningfully articulate the difference it makes when you pay for a game and then take your money back vs not paying for it.

But consider this: how would a 30 minute demo of a game be different than the first 30 minutes of the full game? Like screenshots and reviews it would be designed to give you an overview of the complete game experience it is trying to sell you, whereas the first 30 minutes are what is necessary to get the game going.

It is true that games with less than 2 hours content are not viable under this model, but the market has spoken and generally agreed that games should provide many hours of entertainment. Either through fun looping gameplay like bloons TD, or online experiences, or if it is based on a limited story line, they must have a massive story like Skyrim or GTA 5.

This is what the market of gamers are demanding and I do not see that changing or that it is an issue. These days it is common for people to spend huge amounts of time on a single game. It is completely normal for someone to say "I have spent 1000 hours on Minecraft/CSGO/Skyrim over the last 10 years" so companies have to adapt to building games that last a decade and can generate recurring sales through things like graphical updates and extra content.

Just because that's the trend doesn't mean that we should, as individuals, encourage it. The same way I don't watch reality TV even though the market is clearly into them, nor would I support systems that would discourage the creation of other kinds of shows.

The whole NES era really was the last terrible period in video game history. No console after the NES had so many games that were so bad and so expensive.

New PS2 games cost around $50 USD back in the 2000s and most new PS4 games actually cost less now when you account for inflation.

>Using the refund process as a trial/demo method is explicitly allowed by valve.

Where does it say that?

The best quote I could find from them:

>Refunds are designed to remove the risk from purchasing titles on Steam—not as a way to get free games. If it appears to us that you are abusing refunds, we may stop offering them to you. We do not consider it abuse to request a refund on a title that was purchased just before a sale and then immediately rebuying that title for the sale price.

> Where does it say that?

Literally the first paragraph on the refunds page.

> You can request a refund for nearly any purchase on Steam—for any reason. Maybe your PC doesn't meet the hardware requirements; maybe you bought a game by mistake; maybe you played the title for an hour and just didn't like it.

https://store.steampowered.com/steam_refunds/

I've never heard of anyone having their ability to get steam refunds curtailed. I've personally refunded dozens of games without an issue.

I was actually thinking of that last line about refunding for a sale but that doesn't quite apply. But if you read in to the first line about removing risk, that would imply trying it out with the intent of purchasing if you like it which is the purpose of a demo.

I have refunded about 40 purchases on steam and never had them denied if you fit in the 2 hours / 2 weeks rule.

Logistics, risk management, and customer acquisition mostly. The latter is less of a thing nowadays with digital distribution but was a bigger deal when people would go to local game store to find something new to play.

It’s so much cheaper to ship units to a few central warehouses of your distributors and then let them handle getting it in the shelves into 100,000+ stores nationwide. And your distributor handles all the retail risk for you, you don’t have to figure out where to build stores, how many to have, how to attract customers, worry about real-estate or rents.

In the classic formulation, a “shopkeeper” is not only an expert in the product, but also in matching product to people. Someone can come in and say “I played Grim Fandango and Monkey Island when I was a kid and I want something like that for my kid but with modern graphics” and they can say “Have you tried Machinarium?” But this cant exist without some business model for the shopkeeper.

This is not a new debate by any stretch, there always was a slice of gamers that didn't rely on any specific shop, got their info through magazines/events etc. and didn't need any support outside of returns and repairs.

But as in the olden days, store staff have a role in solving "I wish I knew X or Y" kind of issues: basically the less verse a user is in the field the more the store can step in and help.

There's recommendations, but there also will be small info that is not obvious, like Switch's dock needing special USB chargers, or how language switch works, or what kind of violence there actually is in a game etc. All that info is available somewhere online, but for people who didn't/don't want to spend the time to get up to speed, knowledgeable staff is a boon.

Kid wants the new XYZ game, mother doesn't know what to get him. Clerk helps deduce the game name, console, etc. Or they recommend games.

In 2021 the kid shows mum the steam store page and asks for permission to buy the game right there and then. Or the child is given a steam gift card and allowed to get whatever they want.

Your method has caused a lot of upset when the parent comes back with the wrong game or for the wrong console.

It has also caused a lot of joy when a game arrives unexpectedly and unasked for. I still clearly remember the day decades ago when my father drove up next to me and my friends while we were riding bikes with 3 computer games for me on his passenger seat.

My little brother took over my Steam account. He kept my email address on file and I'd occasionally get emails about games on his wishlist going on sale. It was fun to buy those games sometimes as a little gift out of the blue :)

The value of the spontaneity in this can't be overstated. The modern method feels so much more transactional because we've optimized it away.

You can still do that with steam, just randomly buy a game for your child. Only now you can see their wishlist or recommended based on what they play or many other methods. Much better for the child than a parent going to the store and saying "well they liked this movie, let's get them the cash grab game."

A lot of growth opportunities for entitled children as well.

But yes, while distributors can in theory be useful to customers, I think we’re seeing the end of that business model. And not just in games; car dealerships no longer provide a necessary service. Bookstores and music stores too. Apple made a killing by bypassing distributors, primarily because they could afford to give greater hands–on access to actual phones when people visited the stores.

If a bookstore or game store owner wants the business of recommending things to remain, they shouldn’t try to tie it to a physical store, to inventory and payment processing. All of those things are commodities, while the recommendations need not be, if they are good enough. They should make it a subscription service of it’s own; provide none of the store–related things, just the one–on–one conversation and recommendation.

This is how you end up with Lee Carvallo's Putting Challenge.

Some brick and mortar shops can turn into some kind of club.

The owner tries to federate people around the shop, and sell his stuff along the way. In the case of a game store, he may organize tournaments, special events around the release of a game, help discover some obscure games, hunt down rare items and imports, and of course give competent advise.

Think of parents buying "Gameboys" for their children for example ;)

I bet this follows the same difference we saw with books, music, videos, etc.: when you had a great store conveniently located, the experience is better with knowledgeable staff, a good selection, and better support.

The average, however, wasn’t so great and probably had issues with location/hours/atmosphere which turned off many people (e.g. how many women avoided certain shops due to common behaviors of male clerks?) so there was a large enough underserved market for online stores to tap into.

I don't know of a games store doing this, but there are other retail startups working on putting experts in touch with buyers, such that experts can earn commission for reviewing & recommending items. It seems like a good development to me that can be applied across many areas of online retail.

What you're describing sounds an awful lot like paid shills, unless I'm misinterpreting the thesis.

That would be the case if they took money from the brands they're recommending, which isn't the model. They get money from the retailer instead, who isn't supposed to take sides. It does seem pretty corruptible, though, to your point.

How do we stop corruption if there is a never ending supply of people willing to use deceit to get ahead? Fake reviews, shills, politicians for sale... on what front are people willing to be principled? I think they need to have something at stake, like reputation, at least.

Back to the customer service at games retailers thing, do you think they were ever pure in motive, as far as helping the customer? It was probably a choice that some made, but sales people often have incentives to mislead. I'm sure sometimes the employees were pressured to push certain products, like how warranties get pushed at some retailers.

Some fun supplementary reading is the multicart catalog [0]Tom Fulp (yes that Tom Fulp) acquired and donated to the Video Game History Foundation.

[0] https://twitter.com/GameHistoryOrg/status/140809255481869516...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com