Game, EA & Mass Effect

It's a sad time for the British high street, when it comes to gaming in particular. There are not a lot of dedicated games retailers anymore and those who are left are struggling along on second hand trade sales. Game and also Gamestation (same parent company now) announced today that they would not be stocking any new releases from EA this month, including Mass Effect 3! This was a shock to many people like me who had pre-ordered the game from them months ago. I've always liked Game, going to their big store in Manchester was always a huge treat when I was a child. These days though most of my games are being purchased digitally and most of those through Steam. It's no surprise that this has been hurting the brick and mortar operations. So little space in this shops is given to PC games these days. The one thing that kept me coming back to Game was that they tended to manage to get UK exclusive deals for many of the fancy collectors editions that I like to buy sometimes. The Mass Effect 3 N7 edition was one of those. It seems that the struggling company simply couldn't get the credit terms they needed to buy in the stock. However EA are the biggest publishers of games with many companies under their wings. It's not just Mass Effect, this is going to hurt Game in the long run and I don't see them surviving it. On top of lost sales they've given £5 credit for each cancelled pre-order. I would not be surprised if this time next year there are no dedicated game shops on UK high streets. We'll just be left with large supermarkets and HMV. For me and Mass Effect the collectors edition exclusive has gone and it is now listed at other web shops such as Play and Zavvi. I've re-ordered from Play but it is a bit short notice when we're less than two weeks from the release date now.