Well everyone, big business has found its way to make another striking blow to the little guy. What does this have to do with video games? I will tell you. For those of you, like myself, that are excited for the midnight release of Call of Duty: Black Ops, don't expect it to happen at your locally owned video game store. I, like many, have grown tired of the big businesses that don't carry the old school games that we all grew up with and is all about making a buck instead of the the customer. Back to what I was saying. Yup. If you buy your games from a locally owned video game store, you won't see Black Ops at midnight there. Why is that you ask? Due to many previous Call of Duty games being sold before the date of their releases, Activision will not allow small, locally owned stores to receive the copy until the day of its release. And that is only if they pay extra to have it shipped to them that Tuesday. If they didn't, the will get it later on that week. But what about the big business? Do they get punished as well? Nope... They will still get the game in on time and have midnight releases, if they want to. Why do they not get punished? Because they are "Big Corporations. They never sell the games out early to people, like their friends and whatnot." That is sarcasm if you didn't get it. I can tell you that I know people that have gotten the game before its release and they got the games from the big corporations. So why aren't they being punished. Money pretty much. They help Activision make the big bucks.Rich, Owner of GameXCape a locally owned video game store, said things that I cannot post because of potential children reading this. Pretty much it pisses him off that they are doing this to all small business stores. A midnight release is when he would sell off most of his games for Black Ops but now, who knows how much it will hurt him. Just like other game stores, it will hurt them as well.
So all you people that support your local game stores, be patient with them and keep giving them support. If we didn't have them around, we would be stuck with nothing but expensive games and no place to hang out at.
This is J.P. signing off of here and signing on to my Xbox. See ya next time.
Not to say that I agree with Activision wholly, but to be fair, if that was a major problem for them in the past, this would be the easiest and fastest way to take care of the problem.
ReplyDeleteMuch like when some stupid kid gets himself hurt or killed playing with a toy in a extremely hazardous way, followed by the outrage of the parents because they love arguing, followed by them pulling off things from the market because some of some stupid kids, this argument only worsens the situation.
Or, as a more recent excursion with idiots, people blaming Toyota breaks for being faulty, Toyota getting sued by the govt, being publicly embarrassed, and the the DMV showing after the smoked clear and the anger quelled that almost every single accident claimed to be the break's fault was actually the fault of the owner for not hitting their breaks before the time of impact.
Blaming solely corporations is all cool and dandy and can make you appear to be hip and with the in-crowd, but the fact remains that your blame shouldn't be on Activsion...okay, not ALL of the blame; some stupid shop owners decided to give their games away earlier than they were supposed to and, rather than just focus on them as punishment (it can be pretty easy to tell who is at fault with about a week of actual investigation), they chose to punish everyone but the people they know and trust and have a contract with: Gamestop!
Personally, I would have done something along the lines of having Rich sign some sort of affidavit, saying he nor his staff were at fault with any of the prior events and that they would honor the 12:00 deadline or be sued for breach of contract.
It takes about a hour to write something like this up with a lawyer, 15 minutes to get to a Notary Public for you to get affirmed, and 2 or 3 days to mail it off.
However, Activsion chose to go the easy route and just ban everything, which ends up hurting business for Rich, and for that, you should give the company the one-finger salute.
Oh, and what I said reminded me of this Onion article I read a little while ago: http://tinyurl.com/32jkn2v
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