Same old Retail then

Retail was up to it's old tricks over the festive period along with MCV containing masses of letters from retails moaning about the likes of Tescos selling games at a low price.

Whilst attempting to purchase a HD-DVD unit for the 360 (E-play) I was asked to purchase £100 of extra items I didn't want - crappy 360 WWE games and the like. I don't think so boys,

A friend had a Wii on preorder through one of the largest specialist chains. They've not received this yet, imagine their surprise to walk in there and find they'd decided to put out 10 of the 20 they'd received that morning in enforced bundles, machine, 3 games and a few other high margin items.

Whilst I appreciate that retailers have to make a profit they are shooting themselves in the foot doing this.
Supermarkets don't gouge in this way, others maybe but not like this. I also expect that all those retailers who expect the public to pay more for their games and shop at a specialist probably don't do the same when it comes to their food shopping.

Xmas stock shortages are here to stay, they've been around since the days of the 2600 and Intellivision but the enforced bundling is fairly new - bundling games were a way to reproduce the packages with pack-in games that used to exist pre-PlayStation (Combat for the VCS, Altered Beast for the Megadrive) but give retailers leeway to make things up as they go.

Pack-in games died when Sony decided to go pretty much bare bones with the PlayStation at £299 and appear cheaper than the £399 Saturn that included 2 pads, scart lead, built in memory and Virtual fighter for £399. Official pack in games tied up stock and the games became old and tired fairly quickly not to mention a £299 looks better than £399 as the general public was unaware that they'd end up lumping out for a memory card, game, 2ND controller and scart lead if they wanted to actually see what was going on.

Console bundles were supposed to allow some margin for retailers but a better deal for customers by allowing the purchase of everything they needed in one go. But the option to just buy the machine and say to little johnny that he could spend his granny money on games or allow Granny to buy him a game or pad still existed.

So who's to blame, well everyone really. From the eBay scalpers exploiting it (that'll be me in years past) to the console makers who rushed their releases out as a preventative measure to stop sales of other consoles or didn't make enough to the gauging retailers who think purchases have a short memory and want to cash in and stop a console hitting eBay, they have all played a part.

I feel really sorry for those who for Xmas bonus or savings reasons had to leave it to the last minute and then were disappointed, you have my sympathy for whatever that's worth.