Death On The High Street

I'm a gamer, I've been a gamer for most of my life and I don't expect that to change any time soon. I have a lot of good memories involving video games, a fair number of those take place in local video game stores.

When I was younger local, independent video game stores where quite common place, in fact even small towns would often have at least one, sometimes several. These independent stores would usually only stock a handful of new games, often only ten or so titles for each console. What they were really good for is having large libraries of used games, usually at a considerably cheaper price than they would be to buy new. 

Growing up fairly poor buying used was basically my only option when it came to owning a copy of a video game. For me even getting a used copy of a game was a big thing and I would often spend 30-40 minutes browsing through a shops collection, reading boxes, checking the condition of cartridges and disks and generally making sure I made the best purchase possible with my hard come by coin. This experience was shared by a fair number of other people I knew and over time you'd become familiar with other regulars of the store and the people running them. These stores were often ran by people with a passion for gaming and as such you would frequently find stores holding small tournaments, competitions and open days where customers were encouraged to play the latest releases on the newest consoles. This meant for a lot of gamers shopping for video games became almost a social thing, you knew that in those shops you were amongst other people that shared a common interest with you and that made you feel comfortable.

Unfortunately this period of a market driven by small independent stores didn't last and before long big chain companies like Game, Gamestation and Grainger Games started to push the smaller independents out of the market and over a period of years these stores became more or less none existent. As the larger stores dominated the market the price of used games rose fairly sharply to the point where there was, and there still is, so little saving to be made buying used that it became almost pointless. This turned a lot of people away from high street stores and sent them looking else where in the search for bargains and the internet was more than happy to oblige.

It soon became clear that it wasn't only cheaper to buy used games online, new games were also considerably cheaper too. This was largely due to selling online costing less, everything can be stored and shipped from a warehouse in the middle of nowhere at minimal cost to the company doing the selling. The chains caught on fairly quickly and were soon offering online sales, often to the detriment to their own high street stores.

As the popularity of online shopping increases the high street game store continues to decline, even the chains are now shutting shops and those that don't shut have seen a marked decline in the number of products and titles in stock. Are we on the verge of witnessing the death of the high street video game shop? Something that played such a huge role in the lives of so many, now adult, gamers. Unfortunately I think we might be, I think we've come too far down the path to turn back. The big chains drove the independents out of the market and now it seems they're doing the same to themselves.