I don’t find this surprising, personally. I think every game resaler is going to die very soon unless they go heavily into the niche vintage market.

Everyone has access to the internet and can see what their physical games are worth. And with everyone pinching their coin purse because wages aren’t there, the valuable games that are highly sought or can net near-original-value or more probably aren’t being traded in, they are being sold privately.

Besides which, modern consoles have made the resale market worthless in the long term, what with more than half of them being digital only. It’s really only a matter of time before the only resale of games is vintage markets. You can buy used disc games for nearly-new prices, and I don’t see that dropping because of the limited run of physical games.

I’m not sure they’re sleepwalking into it; I think there’s just very little they can do without pivoting to an entirely different business sector at this point.

• Physical game sales been dropping for years as people get better internet connections, bigger hard-drives and as games come with larger and larger day-one patches
• Many “physical” versions of games these days just contain a download code which only reduces physical sales further
• People often find it easier to buy peripherals on Amazon then go into GAME. And GAME can’t really compete with Amazon when it comes to online shopping.
• GAME tried to diversify into gaming and general “nerd culture” collectibles years ago and it’s obviously not something that’s revitalised their business.

Where do they go from here? I certainly think they handled things poorly 10-15 years ago, and could perhaps have pivoted successfully then if they’d seen the writing on the wall. But pretty much no-one predicted the current landscape back then. It’s only a decade since Microsoft’s disastrous Xbox One reveal where they got savaged for its always online nature and for heading towards digital-only games, with everyone saying, “but we love buying physical copies of games”, and now here we are ten years later with brick-and-mortar stores looking like they might not survive the year and physical sales numbers in free fall.

I don’t think GAME is necessarily mishandling things right now. I just think there’s not really a market for a business like theirs nowadays.

Hmv are basically a vanity project for record labels at this point. They’ve gone bust twice since 2013. Their peers e.g. tower records and virgin megastore are long gone.