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I bet HMV are pretty desperate to be bought out by someone by this point — but do you reckon it would be crazy/desperate enough to accept this offer from GAME’s CEO?
You’ll remember GAME from the 2012 season of hit TV show UK High Streets: Administration; against all the odds, a downsized GAME survived the whole bankruptcy thing and is back selling games to the masses. The CEO’s got ambition, however — so much, in fact, that he’s approached HMV’s administrators Deloittes regarding interest in some of HMV’s retail stores.
What makes this even more worrying is that the owner of GAME also owns Comet, who also went spectacularly bust last year. I think that buying up HMV would just be tempting fate; but it’s slim pickings for HMV at the moment, as the only offers he’s had (apart from this slightly delusional one) are from private equity firms, who will most likely want to gut the business. Maybe selling out to GAME wouldn’t be so bad after all. What do you think? [Reuters]
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Ah the crazy world of business!
Actually makes some sense if they take only profitable stores in areas not overlapped by game or the largest of game/hmv in each town and try to make one company selling the lot instead of two companies semi competing.
The only good thing I can see is if they can apply a similar model of Game to the stores. I.e. buying HMV would allow them to sell CDs and DVDs. They could then use the game points system which allows people to collect points for discounts on future purchases, helping to provide some kind of future trade. Plus the trade in service by game is very useful. It would allow you to trade in your old boxsets of friends for a few quid off the Breaking Bad for example!
It sounds a lot like CEX to me, in which case I’m not even sure they are doing so well as they are rare to find sometimes and their website is absolute rubbish
CEX is doing really well, with no debt & clearing anywhere from £4 million to £10 million a month in profit after all expenses & costs in the UK alone!
I would advise Deloitte to wait till the cheque clears before handing over the keys.
With knowledge like that, I’m amazed you’re not working for them already…
Other handy business tips.
Don’t lend money to people who can’t pay it back.
Interest rates can go up as well as down.
If someone on the internet is doing what you do for less, you’re screwed.
You’re onto a winner there dude. Just make sure you package it all in nice spiral-bound ‘reports’, with over-use of logarithmically-adjusted graphs, and you can call it management consultancy.
I already have a successful business consultancy business and have worked with many famous high street names Woolworths, Virgin Megastore, Comet, Blockbuster and even the 2 companies named here. My latest project was for Tesco’s and involved me finding ways to cut prices in their Value range.
You have a staggering success rate.
Was the horse burger idea yours?
Of course not, I would never condone putting horse meat in beefburgers, the horse just sort of fell into the mincer, a complete accident you understand, and there was no way to remove the contaminated meat without affecting my price cutting measures. As it was, it was free meat and it seemed a shame to waste it.
Kinda like a one legged man entering an arse kicking contest. Game are hardly the go to company for… umm, anyone?
The owner of GAME owned Comet because both companies went into administration and were those administrators were OpCapita. You can’t exactly paint the failure of Comet on them when their entire job was to come in and shut the business down…
With next gen consoles not allowing games to be resold I am guessing it will impacted on stores like Game in a couple of years time. HMV have always been to expensive, Game are still more expensive than online or even super markets. Our town is slowly being taken over by Coffee Shops (not the Amsterdam style ones) we have 24!! Estate agents and restaurants.I see little future in many of the big stores. Clothes, food and jewelry shops will remain but little more.
i would wait till after the announcement from Sony and Microsoft on the Xbox 720 and playstation 4. as both are rumoured to be looking at cloud gaming physical shops may not be worth it at all!
i think we need to face it that electrical and music/movie shops are gone from the high street and in the next five years the only thing that will be left on the high street will be coffee shops and clothing stores. everything else will be online.
maybe the future is having try out stores funded by multiple online retailers with just one or two test models on display in big central locations, where you can go in and look at a test model but you do your buying online and its delivered to you.
Cloud gaming is highly unlikely in the short term, the high speed internet infrastutcure is not yet in in place in enough households to make it viable. People want games on release, either via an in store pick up or release day postage, and don’t want to wait hours for the game to download.
Then you have the storage / back up issue. Your system dies, do you want to have to redownload your 10, 20 or more games over days to your new device? That’s been annoying enough with just a few PSN games for me on a couple of occassions this gen.
Add to this, digital games on PSN seem to range from £50 – £60 for a new game, that’s up to £20 more than in store. No thanks!
They are likely safe for most of the next generation but the end of a traditional game store is in the future. Merging with HMV could actually provide some sustainability. The only way I can see them surviving long term is to become more demo oriantated, you can go in store and play demos of games / music but still make a digital purchase in store that is competitive with the online price (or includes exclusive DLC).
Steam seems to work with it just fine, and allow most big games to be pre-installed, with hundreds of thousands of concurrent players.
No one is going to go into a store in their city centre to play a demo and then buy a game when the option to do all that from the comfort of your home is there, most companies don’t want to allow demos anyway because they’re not worth it.
Frankly, I don’t think you actually know what you’re talking about
I’m talking about the fundamental problems with cloud gaming for the average console gamer on an average internet connection(i.e. me). Nothing to do with Steam which works very well on the PC platform (and maybe soon via a console style stystem).
The hard drive in my PS3 is locked to that system. If I fill a 500GB hard drive with digital games and demos and the PS3 dies, that 500 GB takes a loooooong time to redownload. Hence why moving to that distribution model isn’t ready just yet (can’t be bothered to find links but several industry voices have echoed this).
With the in store demo thing, all I’m getting at is that the likes of Game and HMV need to find new ways to engage people and get them in store. Last night I was at an EA organised event in a GAME store to play Dead Space 3. What worked about that is that it was giving people the opportunity to play a game ahead of time, engage socially with other gamers but also the GAME staff, talk about other games, make pre orders and purchases.
I’m not saying it’s the saving grace of the high street store but they need to look at the things they can offer that the internet can not. So I do know what I’m talking about thank you, you just happen to disagree with me, which is fine.
The end point, as I said though, will probably be the same whatever they try – no more stores in the city. Change is inevitable, unfortunately the result will also be several thousand more jobs lost. And I’d say any steps they can take to adapt and give these people a little more time in gainful employent is worth the effort.
Sadly Captainparty called it – cloud gaming works absolutely smashingly on Steam. I think it’s partly Valve’s anticipation of building a service like this 3/4 years before anyone thought it would work and by that time, Steam had lots of traction with gamers. Of course, bundling it with the long-awaited Half Life 2 did wonders for adoption rate, but I digress.
Speaking as someone who recently reinstalled Windows, it was a minor inconvenience to have my PC sitting in a corner downloading and installing titles – compared to finding the original discs, inputting codes, disc swapping and the like, it was an absolute breeze. Hell, I could (and did) do it in my sleep.
Dear god, my monocle popped out in abject horror.
If I were the owner of GAME I would be looking at getting out of the business with as much money left as I could get. Its going to die eventually, probably after the next gen console release. After the early adaptor rush and high sales I would shut up shop.
Thank God you’re not the owner of a company then. That’d be a shocking way to attempt to run a business.
It’s ‘adapt or die’, not ‘don’t be bothered and quit’.