Doorbusters and Videogames — Aint Capitalism Grand?

So as we enjoy the annual gorgefest that is Thanksgiving weekend there are a good chunk of us out there who will be burning off some of those calories battling the crowds looking for deals. How does that translate in the gaming world?

As we highlighted in a recent  post, the marketing machines have all slowed down to a crawl now that all the big-budget releases have hit the shelves (sorry Tony Hawk: Ride!). So as we with the websites start to spend our collective keyboards looking back at 2009 and picking our games of the year, consumers can look forward to the next few weeks of “crazy” deals that retailers far and wide will be offering in an attempt to move some of this year’s top titles. How crazy? Well, it’s not Dr. Frankenstein trying to reanimate an 8-ft corpse with electricity crazy but it is impressive and somewhat comical to see what stores consider deals and what they’ll do to try and move some of this merchandise. All this in a year when videogames as a whole have dropped in sales and the signs of the recession finally made its way to the seemingly recession proof industry.

Everyone from Target, to Wal-Mart to Toys R Us is serving up their own slice of the gaming pie with deals ranging from markdowns on new releases (a $40 game instead of a $60 deal — $20 bucks is not a crazy deal by any measure but hey it’s still 2o bucks) to the crazy bundle deals. Bundle deals like buy an Xbox Elite and 6 games for $300 — now that’s a deal except you don’t choose the games. The 6 games alone would cost you half the price of the console but the bigger question is, would you buy these six games anyway and will it be enough to get you to spend $300 on a new console rather than just $40 plus tax on a game? Maybe the uninformed present or the gaming nube but us gamers are a little wiser to those kind of deals.

It would seem that both last year and this year, in our current economic situation, the keyword is deal and if it doesn’t really sound like one then too bad retailer. On the plus side you have proof positive from the Modern Warfare 2 sales that people are willing to spend money on a game but does that scenario play out in holiday shopping? On the down side this may be a situation where because consoles and games are such high end items anyway that the gift givers may opt for the gift card which means the recipients may or may not choose to buy game stuff. The classic “I don’t know what he owns” utterance means a gift card is an easy out. But that means all these doorbuster deals are moot.

As to whether this holiday shopping season will salvage the sales slump will be determined in a month or so but for now retailers are certainly doing their part to make it happen.

Doorbusters and Videogames — Aint Capitalism Grand?