GAME hails 3DS dominance

GAME became the No.1 retailer for 3DS during its launch, despite being undercut by a price war that raged between supermarkets and online rivals.

Prices of the 3DS fell from 230 to under 180 ahead of the console’s arrival on March 25th, with UK stores competing heavily to steal pre-orders and win
market share.

But it was GAME that came out on top, despite selling the console at its highest market price. CEO Ian Shepherd told MCV this highlights how important specialist retail can be to the games market.

A lot of our UK competitors were playing with one club, which was headline price,” he said. If I believed only what I read in the papers, then the view would’ve been that a lot of the general retailers were very aggressive on price so must have done well. Actually, what we saw is that GAME did very well.

"When a product is new in the marketplace, the customer turns to the specialist. They want to talk about the product, they want to see it demonstrated, they want to put pre-orders down and they want to trade in their old DS to get money off the new product.

We took the largest market on 3DS, despite all the price competition – we sold the product profitably – and were still able to give customers fantastic value by using trade-in, reward points and other elements of our mechanic.

As a story, I think it is a fantastic illustration of the power of the specialist retailer. It is not true of every market, but it is true of the games market and of GAME Group.”