The company has cancelled all pre-orders for The Last Story in addition to announcing plans to close 35 stores.
February hasn’t been kind to Game, the UK’s biggest brick-and-mortar games retail chain. A few weeks ago, news broke that the company had lost its credit insurance after skirting the edges of its loan repayments and would have to start paying cash up front for stocks of new titles. Shortly thereafter, the company announced that it would not be stocking Tekken 3D Prime Edition for the 3DS or The Last Story: Special Edition for Wii; a little later, it revealed that wouldn’t be stocking any of Ubisoft’s various launch titles for the PS Vita.
Now, The Last Story for Wii has been dropped from Game’s releases altogether barely a day before its launch date. All pre-orders have thus been cancelled, with Game representatives saying in a statement that anyone with a pre-order receipt can reclaim their £5 deposit at any Game store.
In addition to this, Game has announced that it will close 35 of its Game and Gamestation stores in short order (the specific locations have been notified, and the company says it will aim to relocate staff where possible) and plans to reduce its overall shop count from 610 to 550 locations by Christmas 2013. Additionally the company will next week close one of its websites, gameplay.co.uk., and in doing so fold that site’s functions into sister site gamestation.co.uk.
That’s it for now. As mentioned above, Game (combined with its subsidiary, Gamestation) is the biggest games retail chain in the UK. Though the rest of Friday’s releases should be stocked in as planned, the company does remain in the uncomfortable position of negotiating stock with publishers on a title-by-title basis; until it removes itself from this position, uneasiness about the company’s future, and the revalued validity of various pre-order receipts, is unlikely to ease off.
Source: CVG
