It’s no secret that GameStop does some serious business with its used-game sales racket; even in an industry that is seeing a steady decline in this rough economy, the sales giant is actually seeing a profit spike. Normally people don’t like to choke the golden goose, but recently a GameStop “spokesperson” named Niall Lawlor spoke very candidly about the company’s stance on its lucrative practice.
“We discovered the used business was a way of preserving our margins,” Lawlor said. “We don’t like being in the used business, it’s very difficult to manage. If we hadn’t got the used business, we wouldn’t be there.”
That’s sort of an odd position for a GameStop spokesperson to take, isn’t it? For a company that single-handedly started the trade-in scheme, bemoaning the method by which you pull in ridiculous amounts of cash is a little strange. GameStop quickly tried to stem the comments by maintaining that Lawlor was an impostor, but that would be kind of hard to pull off at an industry event. What do you guys think? Any opinion on this strange bit of news?
Source: 1up via GamesIndustry.biz and Kotaku
Kinda weird, since we do make more profit off of used sales rather than new.
Yeah, I mean. It’s like they want us to feel sorry for them or something, I dunno. It’s hard for me to feel sympathy when I see year old games still priced at 54.99 used. That’s just criminal.
And they buy them for 6 bucks. I think they’d be in the business of used games even if there wasn’t a recession. It’s not like a business would turn down money.