Originally Posted by
Wraith
On Gamestop: When a new game is sold full-price, the seller makes $10-15, the publisher makes $10-$20, and the developer often makes just under $10. Gamestop didn't like this, and figured out that they could sell the same game at the same price over and over and over again, and the second sale and later they were making $40 while everyone else was making jack. Their business model is extremely predatory, and based around selling the exact same copy repeatedly and screwing everyone else out of their cuts. They buy used games for $5 in store credit, and then sell them for $55. This isn't any significant benefit to the consumer either, as they often only save a few dollars for used copies, and Gamestop works to prevent them from actually having the choice to buy new.
Then there are the store policies like forcing people to preorder if they want to forgo the anal rape. Like OG said, they open up and screw around with any new games, but hey, they don't want people who buy new to have better quality products than the people who buy used, since they make more money off the latter and don't have to share. They have been caught before actually removing and destroying content from the packages of "new" games just because they didn't want consumers to have it. This was as company-wide policy, not just one store doing something wrong. They will outright lie to people about availability of new titles, and seek out ways to punish anyone who doesn't preorder - it's company policy not to sell new games to people on launch day unless they preordered regardless of stock, which involves giving them money for nothing in return. They count on customer mistakes causing a number of preorders to go unclaimed and allowing them to keep the money having given nothing in exchange.
If you ever do try to buy anything from them, you have to go through a long ritual where they try to make you preorder random stuff and subscribe to stupid magazines inferior to the stuff you can get for free on the internet. Because of the demands they make on their employees, it's not uncommon to hear stories of people who had a grudge held against them for refusing to buy any of that extra crap. Oh, and whatever you game you buy has a good chance to just be an expensive paper weight. Because they prefer selling used games, and open, pick apart, and man-handle the new games, a higher than normal amount of their products are defective in some manner. They don't have any tests or quality control to make sure they're not selling useless junk. (Fun fact: sometimes the only reason they have used copies of a game on launch day is because somebody returned a defective copy, and then they can claim both the credit from the publisher and a used copy sale!)
PC games are harder to sell used, so Gamestop barely acknowledges their existence.
They also wield, and abuse, an large amount of power in the games industry. They make publishers pay for shelf space long in advance (Walmart actually does the same thing), which pushes publishers to release games at a given time ready or not, and software development is incredibly unpredictable to start with. They once outright murdered the developer Sir-Tech because Sir-Tech didn't want to pay them enough money to stock their games - they threatened to increase the price they charged any publisher who did business with Sir-Tech games. Sir-Tech finally went totally under for lack of a publisher, and only managed to get their last game out because Electronics Boutique (Gamestop's chief competitor at the time) took pity and agreed to publish for them a year after the game was finished.
Then they went and killed Electronics Boutique. Where Gamestop became big based on predatory sales and finding new ways to screw over more people, EB became big from crazy-good customer service, at a level that's no longer possible to find anywhere. (They felt "This game had only 20 hours of content" was a perfectly good reason to issue a full refund) There are still stores called EB around, but even the ones that haven't changed their names to Gamestop yet are now just Gamestop dancing around in an EB skin suit, a crude mockery of what they once were.
tl;dr: Fuck Gamestop.
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the windows 8 homescreen is the start button. you literally start typing what you're looking for and it starts displaying results. totally skips having to click the start button to get started.
Most of the mobile device features are premised on those devices having some handicap, whether it be a lack of a keyboard, a small screen, or poor processing power. Why would you possibly want to create those same disadvantages in desktops?
then I got my giftcard and at the bottom was this disclaimer:
