Rantology: That Kotaku GameStop Article

Okay. sooooooo yea, journalism, not just mainstream but games as well, has a really nasty habit of not doing their research and sensationalizing things.  Specifically I'm talking about a recently published article on Kotaku about GameStop's Circle of Life.  What I want to do here is discuss a few critical things in this article, and bring to light a few facts that were conveniently left out, or not communicated.  First though, I make transparency in what I do a point of personal pride, so with that in mind I'm going to be transparent, and as I've stated before, I am employed by GameStop on a part time basis.  I'm not a manger, I'm not in charge of a store, or a district, simply a Game Adviser.  Now along with that, there is a document I signed called the "Social Media Posting Guidelines" that more or less state that I cannot post about upcoming promotions, company "secrets", inventory, and other things of that ilk.  I'm probably going to be going against that, but the truth is way more important in this issue than that piece of shit corporate sellout document in this case.

Okay, I'm going to leave images out of this as much as I can, since this is kind of a brass tax issue.  I'm also going to quote the Kotaku article directly and offer my insights and personal experience about this.  So if this isn't that funny, I apologize, but I feel this is one of the few times I need to be somewhat serious and address an issue head on.

The article starts off like this: "They may simply be lying to you, fueled by a new program that discourages GameStop salespeople from selling unopened copies of video games.

The program, called “Circle of Life,” gives each GameStop store different percentage quotas for 1) pre-orders; 2) reward card subscriptions; 3) used game sales; and 4) game trade-ins."  The fact is that is simply not true.  Circle of Life is a sales technique that has been used by GameStop for years.  The idea is that the PRO card is the center of it all and drives everything else, it further goes on to say when you buy a new game you want to pre-order it to make sure you have a guaranteed copy you can get when it releases, then when your done playing that game you are welcome to trade it back to us and apply the money you get towards another game, if it's preowned all the better for us, and we encourage you to keep pre-ordering games to keep you coming back.  More or less trades drive value, which drives sales.  It's not a new sales program, and neither are the metrics behind it.  They're just now what we're focusing our numbers on.

"Each of these quotas is based on the store’s total transactions. Pre-orders and reward cards subscriptions are based on the number of transactions, while used game sales and trade-ins are based on the total dollar value of transactions. If a store’s quota for used game sales is 30%, and the store sells $1,000 worth of merchandise, GameStop expects at least $300 of that merchandise to be pre-owned."  Wrong.  This isn't true at all either.  In fact it's so untrue it could be called an Alternative Fact.  These numbers are derived from qualifying sales.  If an item CAN be sold as preowned, then it will ping the numbers, but if its a t-shirt, yea that's not happening.  Same with the PRO card.  If you have a PRO card attached to an order already it wont hurt your PRO numbers, same if the card would offer no value to the transaction.  I've done the numbers, looked at the statistics, and personally performed the experiments on all of this.

"In other words, according to salespeople speaking to Kotaku and elsewhere on the internet, GameStop is incentivizing employees to stop people from buying new games and hardware. " Again, this is simply not true, we're not incentivized to do shit.  We don't see extra money, we don't see less.  Yea, they'd like for us to hit these goals, and it makes us look A LOT better if we do, but as far as I've been made aware there has been absolutely no communication from leadership saying we need to stop selling new product.  What this is, however, is a case of shitty employees and managers seeing this, trying to get their numbers up, and telling people this.  If you trust your local store then continue to go there and utilize them as a resource, but I can assure you, the "official policy" isn't to lie to customers.

"“We are telling people we don’t have new systems in stock so we won’t take a $300 or $400 dollar hit on our pre-owned numbers,” one GameStop employee told me in an e-mail, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to press. “This is company wide and in discussions with my peers it is a common practice. We also tell customers we don’t have copies of new games in stock when they are on sale—for example, Watch Dogs 2 is currently $29.99 new and $54.99 pre-owned. We just tell them we don’t have the new one in stock and shuffle them out the door.”"  Again, see above.  This is an example of one shitty person in the GameStop hierarchy making it shitty for everyone else, not the company as a whole.

"GameStop staff have told me that corporate managers are monitoring both stores and individual employees, asking everyone to get a COL score of at least 75% by hitting at least three of their four quotas. If a store is hitting their COL targets but one salesperson is not, that salesperson may face punishment or even lose their job, according to company employees." While some of this is true, the fact remains that its not in the official policy that we can be fired over this.  If it was, we would have signed a form to acknowledge the policy changes as is federally mandated by US law.

Really the take away here is that the people who were talking to Kotaku either made a lot of this up, are really shitty people, or have really shitty people directly above them.  Yes the CoL is a thing, no it doesn't mean we're out to get you.  Yes PRO and preowned make up a HUGE portion of our profits, no that doesn't mean everyone is going to try and push you on all of it and make you do the 20 questions dance.  Yes its important for us to hit our goals, but its no more important than you and your job, and even if we do face punishment up to including termination we still have a right to fight back and ask why.  This is all just another one of those desperate stupid post holiday policy changes every store does to make its final quarter look a little better than it actually is and end on a high note.  Why is it so aggressive then?  Well 2016 sucked, and surprisingly enough it sucked for games too.  not much major came out and even the yearly heavy hitters didn't do well, but 2017 is looking to change that.

I could go into this more and talk about how we used to push the warranties and season passes super hard and were judged off them as well, but I'm not, I've said my piece.  I hope you found this insightful and somewhat useful in trying to get a better grasp of this situation.