BC GAME

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Patrick OShaughnessy
@patrick_oshag 4 years, 4 months ago 574 views

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1/ GameStop is one of the most fun businesses to study for both its success and failure.

Relative to other specialty retailers, it dominated up until the financial crisis, but has since done very poorly.

But unlike Tower Records or Blockbuster, it is still in business

2/ Thanks to the tailwind gaming has provided, its revenues have grown long-term but EBITDA and margins have been terrible as the gaming world has digitized over the past 5 years.

3/ As I learned in @joosterizer book One Up, their early physical retail edge rested on counterpositioning: doing things Walmart and others couldn't:

1. Accessibility
2. Deeply trained expert staff
3. Tailored loyalty program
4. Custom inventory management for used game sales

@joosterizer 4/ Accessibility

There are 5,500 GameStop stores, often more than one in the same mall (mostly because of EB acquisition). Can always find one.

They install ramps--not for wheelchairs, but for strollers because parents are the real buyer

@joosterizer 5/ Trained Staff

As @joosterizer told me recently, try to go into a GameStop and stump a staff member. They can help you navigate much better than a generic retail employee. Creates loyalty and trust that wouldn't be possible if they didn't just focus so specifically on games.

@joosterizer 6/ Loyalty Program

Standard reasons for a loyalty program, but it helped them manage inventory with pre-sales and reserves, and they used Game Informer (only remaining gaming magazine really) to keep people interested.

@joosterizer 7/ Used game sales

This is the most interesting. Blockbuster games would be resold 6x, and GameStop made all the money on resales.

Required complicated accounting and inventory systems to manage re-sales. Others couldn't compete.

@joosterizer 8/ I think all of these areas of edge could be studied and applied to other retailers, yet GameStop's survival is in deep question because they missed the move to digital.

So interesting to me that edge can be developed and then so quickly eroded.

Its always Day One

For those asking, check out Chapter 3 of @joosterizer book One Up for more.

Charts were made via an internal tool @OSAMResearch developed by @Jesse_Livermore

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Hello friends, let's talk about gamer expectations of work/life balance & why they need to stfu.

There's a certain type of Gamer w/ a Hard R that believes their video games are the center of all existence. They've made their identity so fixated on gaming in general, or a game/games in particular, that nothing else comes close.

To those obsessive gamers, those in the game industry should consider themselves privileged to work on such important material. And w/ that privilege comes accepting that nothing in the employee's life is as important as The Game.

B/c gamer identities revolve around a game, they literally cannot comprehend that an employee might have other things in their life. They don't understand that employees, esp devs, have a right to boundaries b/c The Game trumps all.

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So @moreelen posed the question about "How to stay motivated with side projects". I left a few tips but I wanted to elaborate here.

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1. Post GIFS of cool things you have made.
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I make posting GIFS a key part of my working day.

2.Dont bother with blogging or long dev logs.
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3. Keep a log of what you do.
It's is easy to feel like you haven't accomplished much so I like to keep a simple .txt with a list of the things I set out to do & the things I accomplished. It reminds me of my progress & can double as a quick commit message at the end of the day

4. Try and find the fun tasks.
When you are working on non player facing (or non GIF-able) stuff, its again easy to feel like you haven't done much. When I am bogged down in refactoring or save systems etc, I try and save myself something small and fun to do, like a VFX.

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I'm seeing a lot of echoes of the GamerGate phenomenon happening right now, so it is important to revisit this a little, quickly.

Thread:

GamerGate was a misogynist movement to harass women online who were in the gaming industry or interested in games. They organized on message boards in places like Reddit and 4chan and picked targets together.

GamerGate didn't appear out of thin air. GamerGate was a representation of white male entitlement that has existed in our culture forever. In particular, the mantra "ethics in games journalism" made no sense and they targeted people who noted how games have bad representation.

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