According to Yahoo!, GameStop are buying Electronics Boutique, for “only” $1.44 billion (compared to Adobe’s purchase of Macromedia for $3 billion, this doesn’t seem like a lot).
I can’t say I’m thrilled at this. The level of competition in Dublin’s retail video game market is already virtually nil. GameStop’s arrival last year through the purchaseof Gamezone killed one of the few independent retailers left in the country. Now, since Electronics Boutique own Game, and now GameStop owns Electronics Boutique, it means that GameStop has control of 95% of retail video game outlets in Dublin.
The few places left to buy games (with some value – meaning Dixons and Argos are out) are:
* Smyths
* Xtravision
* GameXchange on Talbot Street (mainly second hand stuff – snes/megadrive)
* ??
I generally don’t like buying games over the internet. I’d like to say it’s because of the hassle of sorting out returns if the game is damaged in any way, but the truth is that it’s just because I’m an impatient little shit who can’t wait a week for delivery when he could pay just a couple of euro more to get it *today*.
But with GameStop’s mark-up fast reaching epic proportions, it’s looking like there’ll be no choice soon.
**UPDATE**
After a bit of hunting around, I found [this on Yahoo](http://biz.yahoo.com/e/050407/elbo10-k.html):
So it looks like there is still a little bit of competition left after all.
play.com play.com play.com 🙂
I always thought ‘Game’ were associated with HMV.
Probably just the similar brand colours 🙂
It’s hard to dig through all these layers of who owns what and how certain corporate entities tie in to each other. That’s made even harder when “Game” (or even “the Game Group”) have such a generic name.
But I’m fairly sure Game aren’t owned by HMV.