GameStop: Our games could be sold through other retailers worldwide

GameStop-published titles may be made available via other retailers in certain countries, the company says.

GameStop announced its GameTrust publishing arm earlier this week. It will release between five and ten games a year, including titles from established developers such as Insomniac, Ready at Dawn, Frozenbyte and Tequila Works. Its first game, Insomniac’s Song of the Deep, is due on July 12th.

The firm will be releasing the game exclusively via their stores – which total more than 6,200 worldwide. It will also be pushing the title against its 44m Reward Card holders.

The game will also be released on Steam, PSN, Xbox Live and other platforms.

However, outside of the US, GameStop’s global presence is patchy. In the UK, it operates a single website and no High Street stores, while in other territories it doesn’t feature a physical presence at all.

GameStop’s physical outlets – plus its ability to create merchandise based on these games via its ThinkGeek division – is one of the firm’s biggest selling points amongst developers. So MCV asked the retailer whether it would be open to working with international retail partners.

We are completely open to that,” said the division’s boss Mark Stanley.

We don’t quite have a cookie cutter model of this or that. In countries where we do have GameStop stores we do want to keep that exclusivity for our customers, but we have actually been in conversations with numerous different partners in other regions of the world where we don’t have presence, like Asia and Latin America for example, where there are big gaming communities to try and reach both digitally and through physical stores.”