By Dante Spado
GameStop has been a topic of hot conversation for the last few months after shaking up the world of stocks. It went from being a failing company to a Fortune 500 in a matter of days. For those like me, GameStop isn’t equated to stocks and Reddit, but to childhood memories of gaming. I remember going to the GameStop in Concord Mills in the third grade to do a Pokemon event where you had to physically be in the store to access what was going on.
GameStop used to have a stronghold on the gaming world, and they were infamous for selling games at a high price and buying them back at a ridiculously low value, only to sell them used at a high price again. They hardly treated their customers well because they knew they had a near-monopoly in the gaming industry, so what were we to do?
GameStop is in the process of rebranding and they have this fun new image thanks to everything that happened in the stock market. But recently I learned there are some things about the old GameStop that still hold true.
Some of you may recall the blog about Rock Band I wrote a few weeks ago. In case you were curious, my roommates and I still play obsessively to the point where we’ve played the songs on Rock Band, Rock Band 2 and Guitar Hero 5 so many times we were getting sick of them. Naturally, we started looking around for a new game, and we got our sights set on Rock Band 3. Alex purchased it with a GameStop gift card he had from years ago, and we anxiously awaited its arrival.
After about a week it showed up on our doorstep and we immediately popped it into our Xbox. But there was a problem. The game didn’t work. For some reason, the Xbox could not read the disc. I cleaned it several times, but it wasn’t dirty and didn’t have any scratches to begin with. The Xbox kept reading it as a DVD, and it was impossible to make it load. Naturally, Alex got on the phone with GameStop’s customer service, which we were all dreading, remembering back to our younger days when the power was not with the players.
Much to our surprise, the customer service person was awesome. They apologized for the broken game and told us that a new one would be to us by Monday free of charge with expedited shipping. This was great! Sure we had to wait a few more days, but we didn’t have to pay for another copy, which we were sure we’d have to do.
Monday came and went, and the game did not show up. So, Alex called again and got a new customer service person. This person told us there was “a delay with the processing” and that they would send the copy of the game out that very day, and we could expect it by Friday. This sounded a little bit more like the GameStop of old, disorganized and clueless, but we were still happy that the game would come and that we didn’t have to pay for it.
Unsurprisingly, the game did not come by that Friday. Alex called a third time and we finally were on the phone with the GameStop of 2013, the one we knew and loved. They told us that we had to send the copy of the broken game back in order to receive a new one, something the previous two representatives never told us. Then we were transferred over to a FOURTH person who informed us that there weren’t even any more copies of Rock Band 3 in stock. This wasn’t totally surprising, as the game is almost a decade old, but again, this NEVER came up with the previous three people. They were all trying to send us a game that they didn’t even have. It baffled me that they didn’t realize this sooner.
As you can imagine, we’ve been Rock Band deprived, as this whole process took place over the course of two weeks. We had to turn to third-party sellers where the game costs double what it did on GameStop (a bit of irony, I suppose). The game should be here Friday, and we can finally start rocking out again.
The final GameStop development was that they told Alex he would get credit back on his gift card since the game didn’t work. That was about four days ago, and he still doesn’t have credit back. I imagine they’ll be getting another phone call.