Looks like I'll just have to boycott Gamestop now... oh, wait, I already haven't bought anything at all from Gamestop (either online or from an actual brick-and-mortar) in over a year now. I think the last thing I got from them was LittleBigPlanet, shortly after I got the PS3 (http://kane-magus.livejournal.com/306108.html) last year. Before that I can't recall when was the last time I got anything from them. LBP wasn't gutted, at least (as far as I could tell, anyway). If it had been, I'd have told them to shove it and just went to Target or somewhere instead. Only reason I even went to Gamestop then was because it was on the way home from work, rather than in the opposite direction like Target is, and I didn't want to wait a week to get it from Amazon.
Speaking of gutting new games, I still think the fact that they're doing that at all and then still selling them as "new" is blatantly false advertising which should be actionable in and of itself, imnsho, regardless of whether they're altering the contents or not. If the game has been opened, for any reason, then in my eyes it is no longer "new" and shouldn't be able to be sold as such. But of course, as you said, gamers have been conditioned to find this an acceptable practice, even though it is not, so nothing will ever be done about it. Similarly, I doubt anything will be done about them removing the OnLive coupons either, especially since they're dangling the carrots of free gift cards and "buy 1 get 1 free" in front of people.
As for OnLive, however, it's not necessarily a bad thing that Gamestop is trying to stop the proliferation of OnLive. Note: I'm only being being mostly but not entirely facetious there. I'd say around 90% facetious. But there's still that 10% that wants to see OnLive crash and burn, no matter how it comes about, and if Gamestop being utter dickcheese about the whole thing helps that along, then it's not totally a bad outcome. Then again, the reasons that Gamestop are against OnLive are obviously going to be very different from the reasons that I am against OnLive.
That said, I'd bet Gamestop would have done the same thing with the PS3 versions of Portal 2 and the free Steam PC version included with that if they felt they could have gotten away with it, though. I guess in this case they figured "Oh it's just OnLive, therefore nobody will care about that. We'll wait and save the Steam stuff for later, when we know for sure that we can get away with this sort of thing."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2011-08-28 11:29 pm (UTC)Speaking of gutting new games, I still think the fact that they're doing that at all and then still selling them as "new" is blatantly false advertising which should be actionable in and of itself, imnsho, regardless of whether they're altering the contents or not. If the game has been opened, for any reason, then in my eyes it is no longer "new" and shouldn't be able to be sold as such. But of course, as you said, gamers have been conditioned to find this an acceptable practice, even though it is not, so nothing will ever be done about it. Similarly, I doubt anything will be done about them removing the OnLive coupons either, especially since they're dangling the carrots of free gift cards and "buy 1 get 1 free" in front of people.
As for OnLive, however, it's not necessarily a bad thing that Gamestop is trying to stop the proliferation of OnLive. Note: I'm only being being mostly but not entirely facetious there. I'd say around 90% facetious. But there's still that 10% that wants to see OnLive crash and burn, no matter how it comes about, and if Gamestop being utter dickcheese about the whole thing helps that along, then it's not totally a bad outcome. Then again, the reasons that Gamestop are against OnLive are obviously going to be very different from the reasons that I am against OnLive.
That said, I'd bet Gamestop would have done the same thing with the PS3 versions of Portal 2 and the free Steam PC version included with that if they felt they could have gotten away with it, though. I guess in this case they figured "Oh it's just OnLive, therefore nobody will care about that. We'll wait and save the Steam stuff for later, when we know for sure that we can get away with this sort of thing."