Where will the former customers of GAME’s 277 closed stores go? Blockbuster and HMV believe they are the prime destinations. Christopher Dring investigates
A BATTLE is being fought on the High Street.
GAME has closed 277 stores and its major rivals are scrambling to win its customers. Supermarkets and online giants are hoping to capitalise. Tesco’s bold ‘Home of Gaming’ press ad set out its belief last month that it has the specialist credentials to step up. But on the High Street itself there are two main competitors who have positioned themselves to wrestle market share from GAME. “We have nearly 600 stores, a database of nearly 4.2m people and a lot of consumers have grown up with us,” says Blockbuster’s UK commercial director Gerry Butler. “We have picked up a lot of business owing to the demise of some of GAME and now, in some towns, we are the only games retailer on the High Street left.” HMV CEO Simon Fox adds: “The
High Street has nearly 300 fewer dedicated games outlets. We have a very credible games offer on many of those High Streets and it would be absolutely criminal of us to not take advantage of that. I wish the new GAME success, I think Martyn [Gibbs, GAME CEO] is a great leader of the business. But they are a competitor and we need to do
14 May 18th 2012
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The High Street has 300 fewer games specialists. It would be absolutely criminal of us to not take advantage of that.
Simon Fox, HMV
everything that we can to grab market share, both where we are up against them and where we are not.”
GAME ON FOR HMV
HMV’s statement of intent is the most surprising.
Only three months ago the chain
told MCVit wasn’t getting the support it needed from suppliers and would be decreasing in-store space for video games. It merged its games and technology teams together, which resulted in the departure of long-term video games boss Tim Ellis. And although the retailer never outright said it, it was clear that the games industry’s link with HMV had been diminished. But that, says CEO Fox, has changed completely.
“It is true to say that prior to Christmas, and running right through Christmas, the support that we were getting from the games industry in general was very disappointing. Post-January when we managed to get our own business into a much more stable place, we have been able to rebuild our relationships with all of the key publishers. And I would say that the relationship that we now have with the games industry has probably never been stronger. We have
certainly gone from a place of thinking that we might have to reduce the space for games, to the exact opposite. “Just look at what we have been doing recently, which is putting games at the front of store, putting them in our market place, putting them on our chart wall.” Suppliers are clearly back on board in a major way, with HMV Oxford Street chosen as the official launch venue for Diablo III earlier this week.
“There is an absolute commitment from us to really drive our games business hard,” says Fox. “We want our market share to increase significantly in the coming weeks.”
BLOCKBUSTER’S GAME PLAN Elsewhere, the closure of those 277 GAME stores means that Blockbuster is now the biggest specialist games chain in the country. That’s a fact it’s
aggressively trying to capitalise on. This year the firm has worked with publishers to secure in-game content for titles such as Tiger Woods 13and Prototype 2. It ran midnight openings for Kinect Star Wars, and has just launched a VIP Gamer loyalty scheme with IGN, which rewards customers for buying