The Retail Perspective

-- August 23, 2005 by: Chris Remo

There are many problems with video game retail. There's the destructive pre-order system which ensures non-AAA titles don't get marketing or shelf space, the overbearing and ridiculous atmosphere of the stores, the terrible selection... These are all big issues. However, they are but side-effects of a larger problem: the current gaming retail model simply is not sufficient to support the widening audience and diverse experiences that make up games today.

Last week, I worked my last day at a video game retailer. It was a job I took for obvious reasons: a love for the subject matter, the chance to engage in meaningful discussion with the customers, and, of course, the employee discount. Looking back on the time I spent selling membership cards and taking money from people with unfathomably deep pockets, I have to admit I'm feeling a little bit shortchanged. My love for the subject matter went through periods of becoming rather hardened and cynical (even more than it already was), and my interactions with customers were almost universally more maddening than meaningful. On the other hand, I did get a lot of mileage out of my employee discount.

As we all know, in stores all the games are sold in the same place and in the same way. From Pokemon to Doom 3 to Katamari Damacy to Splinter Cell, they are differentiated by nothing other than platform, which is becoming less and less useful in actually qualifying anything about a game's character. It's a lot easier to sell the Splinter Cells of the gaming world, of course, so those are the ones that demand the most shelf space, demand the most marketing, demand the most pre-orders when sequels are announced--and, as we all know, sequels are always announced. There are many games released, and gaming stores don't have much shelf space, so when retailers see that a particular type of game doesn't sell well--generally, games that deviate from traditional video game conventions--they simply do not get support at the retail level. This is too bad, but it's even worse when one takes into account how huge of an untapped audience those games really have. I'll be the first to say we need a more diverse spectrum of games produced, but I'll just as readily say that we already have a much more diverse spectrum than many people think! And that's part of the problem: people don't know about those games.

I consider myself a pretty musically literate guy. I'm familiar with many different genres and eras of music ranging from classic rock to pre-Renaissance plainchant, and yet I don't really have any problem finding new interesting music to listen to. There are several big overpriced music retail chains near where I live, but there are also a couple well-stocked independent record stores. They are are economical in their use of shelf space and know that they don't need to keep four dozen copies of every Top 40 record in stock, because their customer base doesn't demand it. I bring this up because I feel that this is the sort of thing that might start to be necessary in the games industry. There are plenty of parallels. I've been gaming for most of my life, I have favorite games spanning just about every genre; basically, I've seen a lot of games, and Reskinned Action Game 59 With Half-Assed "Innovation" really doesn't do it for me anymore. I like to see things that are either different, or have some sort of distinct creative spark to them even if they don't create a new genre--and I know there are plenty of people out there like me.

I have plenty of friends who have never been interested in "Video Games" to the same degree I am but who get genuinely interested in some of the stuff I've shown them that's a bit off the beaten path. Titles like Grim Fandango, Beyond Good & Evil, Ico, Psychonauts, WarioWare--I have used all of these games to seduce non-gamers. And it's a decent cross-section of gaming, too: a traditional adventure game, two action/adventures, a platformer, a... something. The thing they always ask me is, "Where can I find more stuff like this?" I never have an answer, because there really is no good place they can look without burrowing deep into the bowels of the internet. People who discover they could really love games, but who don't really fall into the hardest of the hardcore, in my experience don't really go to gaming retail stores. In the months I worked at my store, I hardly ever saw people like that, but I know they exist. They would come in once in a blue moon, to my relief. We'd have some good conversation and I'd make a few recommendations, but they'd never come back because they can tell that in general these places just aren't for them. When you look around the walls at a gaming retail store, all the games look so EXTREME!!!! and HARDCORE!!!! that it's no wonder the only people who come in are the hardcore gamers who know exactly what they want.

There is another group that frequents gaming retail stores even more than hardcore gamers, and that group I've classified as "hardcore-casual." Those are the people who have only started gaming in the last generation or so, maybe whose first gaming addiction was Halo, and who spend an incredible amount of money on games but who are not very discerning. These customers comprise at least 90% of the people I dealt with on a daily basis, and all they're looking for is the newest thing. They want the latest game that lets them kill the most guys in the most extreme manner because they think that's all games are good for, and that's good enough. Sometimes they don't even look for that, they just ask "What came out this week?" and plunk down fifty bucks. I'm really not exaggerating in the slightest, this is what I saw every day. It explains why my store had twenty used copies of Driv3r and forty of Enter the Matrix. I'm not trying to imply that hardcore gamers have impeccable taste and everyone else is an idiot. I've made poor game purchases in my day, and there have always been bad games that have sold well, but the scale on which I had to personally facilitate it as part of my job was depressing.

In all honesty, those are not the people to whom really interesting and unique games can be targeted. One thing I'm starting to realize is that open-minded hardcore gamers have a lot more in common with casual gamers than I would have thought. I still play plenty of action games and the like, but the really unique games that tend to catch my interest--the ones I talk about with the really devoted gamers--are the same ones that tend to appeal to the casual gamers I know. Go figure.

This all leads back to my original claim, which is that the current retail model is broken. What I'd really like to see would be a retail location focusing on truly interesting games, the ones that are appreciated by long-time gamers demanding progression in gameplay or story or style rather than in pixel-pushing, the ones that are appreciated by casual gamers who aren't looking for extreme action-fests. Obviously a standalone brick-and-mortar store with that focus would be doomed to failure in today's games industry, but an offshoot of an existing store might be a more feasible proposition to attempt in a few test markets. Even just a special rack set aside for those games would be a good start, and wouldn't require much overhead.

I spent some time at a few different branches of my retail chain, and I met a lot of different employees. What was interesting is that at almost every store, there was this one employee who really was a true gamer. Honestly, most of my fellow employees weren't. Most of them just bought all the latest titles, rated games based on superficial attributes, constantly found movie-licensed games to be totally awesome, etc. But there was frequently that one guy who had played Ico, who loved Half-Life for the right reasons, who would be ideally suited to staffing a section of the store targeted to the not-so-mainstream. It was almost impossible for me to really recommend what I wanted to recommend with the sanction of the company. I was expected to push the games we had on display, to scrounge for pre-orders for games that are already guaranteed to sell a million copies; but if the corporations that manage these retail stores realize that there is in fact a market to the offbeat games that they see as a waste of shelf space, it could be great for consumers, for retail employees, and ultimately for the chains themselves as well as game publishers and developers.

Right now, publishers feel afraid to take chances on original games; everyone knows this. I have heard direct quotes from publishers who feel just that way. It's not even an issue they like to dance around, they just admit it--maybe not publicly, but internally for sure. Games like Psychonauts, Beyond Good and Evil, and Rez die at retail, because they show up in stores and nobody notices them, nobody pushes them, and if they are noticed most people just say "What the hell is this? This looks weird. Where's the new Medal of Honor?" And yet games like Rez command $100 premiums on Ebay, because there are so many people who want to play it but who never got the chance because they weren't even aware of those games when they were released. Clearly there is something wrong with this picture.

Publishers already pay millions upon millions of dollars a year to retailers to display and promote their games exactly as they want. Paid demands from Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo (and, to a lesser extent, companies like Ubisoft, Activision, THQ, etc.) are simply part and parcel of retail operation. They create promotions, retailers enact them. They dictate prices, retailers print them on the stickers. The publishers essentially shape a large part of the look and attitude of gaming retail stores, which is why so many of them are pretty much the same. Publishers could be the ones to spur retailers into showcasing interesting games. The problem, of course, is that they'd all try to make individual showcases for their own interesting games, and we'd be back where we started, but if they simply said, "Look, these five games on our upcoming release schedule need special attention, make sure you're targeting them to the right consumers," retailers might start to take notice. Right now, all games are sold in the same way, and it simply doesn't work.

As a side note, if there's one discrete demographic that would benefit from such a place, it's female gamers. While there are of course always exceptions, I found that many of the games that I introduced to my casual gamer friends were the same ones that female customers at my store tended to enjoy. A lot of girls (and women) who came in were interested in games like Animal Crossing, Katamari Damacy, Beyond Good and Evil, even things like Prince of Persia: Sands of Time. (And old Super Mario games. I'm not kidding. Little girls, teenage girls, moms--they wanted to play 2D Mario games. I sold Game Boy Advances to females because of the Super Mario Advance series, and I sold DSes to females with the promise of New Super Mario Bros.) There are of course plenty of young girls who just wanted Barbie games and "horsie games" (lots of requests for those, actually...), but in many cases the games that females came into the store to ask about were gamers' games. The titles they enjoyed often tended to have a less aggressive edge to them--but that's true with many games that want to try something different, because if we're honest with ourselves the whole hardcore aggressive badass thing has been done a little bit to death in games.

There's been a lot of publicity about "growing the market", and with the upcoming and much-vaunted next generation such talk is becoming more and more frequent. It needs to be said, however, that at least part of the much-coveted new audience of gaming is already here, they're just being ignored. Games need to branch out, no question, but more should be done to foster and promote the games that are already doing that. For all its talk, the industry is still too much of a closed system, and that needs to change.

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