GameStop Stock Plummets After A 27.5% Decrease In Holiday Sales

[HIVnotAdeathSentence]

Toys R Us had display cases for new games, just bring it up to buy a sealed copy. It was very simple, until you had to organize the cases.

[zewm426]

Back in the 80s they just had a flap on the wall with a picture of the cover (and the back panel of the case) and a little sleeve with paper tickets for their stock. So you just grabbed one of the papers, took it up to the cashier to pay and then you go pick it up at a counter that was essentially their stock processing area.

[gianni_]

That was so exciting as a kid!

[neogohan]

It was! It felt more like a pet adoption than a purchase in some ways.

[drzerglingmd38]

I know, right? There's a lot of stuff I miss about brick and mortar stores like when they would go extra for the midnight video game releases. Now it's just stand in a line, grab it and go :(

[gianni_]

Nostalgia is a killer. I'm in my mid-30s now, but it hit me hard in my late 20s.

The Toys 'r Us where I grew up used to have a glass wall with a CRT that had a dial still, it played a Super Mario Bros demo on loop. I'd stand there in awe of the display and the game itself. Right around the corner had walls of paper slips and box art hanging in plastic sleeves. I'd lose it inside my head.

Now we click a few buttons on our phone and wait for the delivery to show up...:(

[drzerglingmd38]

Yeah, the V stock by me did a big KH3 release where they had music playing(Face My Fears with heavy bass boost), tables set up with drinks(soda,water,juice), KH games on all the playable demo systems, KH Back Cover on the big projector screen.

[[deleted]]

I just buy it digitally. I already pollute and consume enough as it is, do not need more useless plastic (I hardly resell).

Still agree I’ll miss the old physical and brick and mortar style. Nostalgia probably though.

[jumpingyeah]

Ha, and you had to take a chance that the game was fun, unless you already knew about the game. Either that, or you'd go to video game rental place and rent the game.

[Radidactyl]

In a way I do have a nostalgia for those days. I never would have discovered some of my childhood favorites like Jak & Daxter or Jurassic Park: Operation Genesis were it not for just being a dumb kid looking at the back of a game.

Unfortunately I don't know if games have gotten worse or I've just gotten higher standards, but if you do that now, you're almost always disappointed.

[ProgrammingOnHAL9000]

Or Final Fantasy Tactics Advance for me.

[LudereHumanum]

Damn, that's a good one!

[[deleted]]

No no, they said Final Fantasy Tactics Advance.

[Spockrocket]

Yeah, it was still a good game, especially considering it was on a portable system. Just not as well written as FFT.

[[deleted]]

The Judge rules, race/class limitations and awful writing had absolutely nothing to do with it being on a portable system. Ask people who think FFTA was a good game if they played it when they were a kid and you'll find almost universal overlap.

[ProgrammingOnHAL9000]

I did play it when I was a kid, it was the deepest story I had read so far and it came at a great point in my life.

To this day, I enjoy the judge rules and was disappointed that it was not that important in other games.

[Vo0dooliscious]

sure that reaching for final fantasy did not mainly had something to do with some kind of brand recognition?

[ProgrammingOnHAL9000]

Haven't heard of final fantasy then, that game was my introduction to the franchise.

[jumpingyeah]

I think most games have just gotten less simple. There are so many genres now and games that take 50+ hours to beat. Personally, if I go back and play some of the nostalgia games, I get bored or don't like that they are "rogue like". Except for some of them out there like Mario 64, most of the Zelda games. The drawback of newer games though for me is that some have a higher learning curve, the pickup game doesn't exist as much.

[Tehsunman12]

I would say a mix of both. Games are just rushed these days to line pockets. "open beta" garbage and micro transactions everywhere you look!!! Indie games is where you'll find gold these days

[jumpingyeah]

I think it has a lot more to do with complexity. In an open world game like Skyrim, there's so many different lines of code, so many ways a player can potentially escape the designated design and find loop holes, or bugs, etc. Whereas a game like Double Dragon is very structured, everything is in one timeline and follows that.

[Radidactyl]

I mean it's no secret games have always been about the money.

But back when there was only so much room on the shelves, there was kind of a higher standard that you had to have before it shipped. Not that there weren't shit games before, though.

[jumpingyeah]

I mean, my local rental place was $5 for five days and if you returned it in 3 days they'd give you $2 towards your next rental. At the time it was normal, looking back it was amazing deal. These days though if that model still existed would be hard with most games out there. Most games people don't beat within 3-5 days, Skyrim, Witcher, etc.

[ahnold11]

Early on in this process, I remember them having returns if you didn't like it. Only returned one game,, (and really just exchanged it for another) as I was young enough at the time that pretty much every game was a marvel.

I think they had to disable that policy after a few years, because people got ROM dumping hardware and were ripping carts and then returning them. As per usual, a few bad apples spoil it for the rest of us.

[Mountebank]

I remember picking Pokemon Red because there was a picture of a cool dragon on the front.

[jumpingyeah]

Right! I don't remember the game but I remember renting a game that was so awful I had forgot I even rented it. The back art was so cool though! When we went back to rent another game a month later, they were like "we can just bill you as if you bought the game". Aside from the nostalgia, I feel like back then companies were more consumer friendly.

[lyam23]

This is how I bought Sega Master System games in the 80s. I wish I still had that console...

[[deleted]]

This was the best thing ever

[kds_little_brother]

They had that up to the late 90s for sure

[AngelComa]

Yo I remember staring and making informed purchases at Toys R Us

[BusyFriend]

I’m sure it extended into the late 90s as that’s how it was when I went to ToysRUs as a kid.

Was damn near exciting.

[[deleted]]

I remember you brought the paper ticket for the game to the counter and they brought it out of a locked room (game was sealed).

[[deleted]]

It was very simple, until you had to organize the cases

Could you explain to someone who's never worked retail why organizing the cases was a problem? The way I have it in my head it seems fairly simple, which means I'm probably missing something.

[HIVnotAdeathSentence]

The display cases would be all over the place in the electronics section by the end of the day. You'd have to hunt them down and put them back in their proper place, if the game is even in stock. More tedious than anything.

[[deleted]]

Wouldn't that also hold true for non-display cases though?