GameStop buys EB!

Um... that's probably 3200 - not 32,000 - gamestop has around 1700, EB about the same.

I'm actually surprised - I'd expect EB to buy GS, not the other way around. EB has been around for ages.. I'm confused by this.

oh great nothing like a frickin monopoly.....

This is good for gamers. Less competition = more competition for Wal-Mart.

Good - the EB in my neighborhood is absolutely dreadful!

Great, an even bigger monopoly to keep game prices high. I hope they adopt a more EB-ish approach to the merger as all the Gamestop's around these parts have hardly any games, higher prices, odd store layouts, and are less reasonable on trade-ins. At least the EB's always are packed with used games, although sometimes so much that finding what you want can be irritating or paying $45 when a new game is $50 and they trade it back in for $20. I know they need to make money, but less competition in the used game market can't be good for anybody - it's bad enough as it is.

It should be interesting to see how things progress.

Don't worry, Electronic Arts will just buy GameStop in a couple weeks anyway. I for one welcome our new game-selling overlords.

This is an excellent move by GameStop and will benefit gamers. GameStop has a proven comsistant sales model and a great magazine.

This is an excellent move by GameStop and will benefit gamers. GameStop has a proven comsistant sales model and a great magazine.

Does this mean that G4 will now pimp "Gamestop" in as many references as possible during their segments instead of "EB Games"? I swear, G4 is like a sock puppet.

SOCK PUPPET???!????!!!! WHERE?? WHERE???? AAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!!!

And another update......Adobe just bought Macromedia. Not that this has anything to do with gaming, but for crying out loud, I'm getting tired of all these big companies being bought up by bigger companies. When does it end?

When does it end? When Microsoft owns everything. :)

... Or Skynet.

#2 - GameStop has been around forever too, just not in its current form. IIRC, Babbages and Software Etc. (two other mall-based game/software stores which had been around forever) merged in the mid-90's, only to be somewhat consumed by Barnes & Noble (were they fully bought out?) and eventually have all their stores consolidated under the GameStop name in the early 2000's...

Ive only bought 1 game from gamestop/eb in the past 10 years or so (cubivore), actually 2, they got my wind waker preorder also (so i could get the bonus). I dont like these types of stores but when a rarity comes around that is usually the only place you can find it. I will hold out for best buy or some other store that actually have sales instead of blindly charging full price for everything for the first year. For those of you who trade in its probably a decent place, but i never rid of a game once i buy it. Just a thought.

This is the worst industry news I've heard since EA's NFL exclusivity. Why doesn't the entire industry just form one huge money-devouring corporation and get it over with?

Microsoft just bought the number '3!'

Sony is scrambling lawyers to be allowed to use it in the name of their upcoming Playstation!

You know what keeps game prices high? People buying games at retail outlets. It also delays releases by weeks. If people would stop buying games at retail stores and let these ancient dinosaurs breathe their last, we could get a nice digital delivery system going on. How does playing the game an hour after it goes "gold" sound to you? It's entirely a possibility, single-handedly blocked by the retail bastards who need boxes printed, folded, stuffed with discs that have to be duplicated, transported to the store, stocked on the shelves, and then released at the same time nationwide to coincide with the advertising blitz.

I don't know how many of you were paying attention during the Half Life 2 release, but it was a debacle orchestrated by the retail industry that showed their true colors. They hate their customers and they hate money, or they would have investigated some major changes in the way they do business a long time ago. Steam may be terrible, but it's the first chink in the retail industrys armor and boy howdy do they hate it. Hopefully things like Steam and Fileplanet's Direct2Drive service (which is EXTENSIVELY crippled by retailers and only carries old games, never anything on or before retail release) will grow large enough to crush things like GameStop under their boot.

Until then, the quickest way to get the latest titles is to get them illegally through the Internet. Some day, hopefully soon, some company will look back on that and realize that a group of punks on the net were getting their product into the hands of their customers faster than their own antiquated structure allowed them to and they're going to realize just how stupid they were for so long.

OtakuCODE, are you saying you LIKED Steam and you prefer it over a non-Orweilian, untrackable (cash) approach? Please tell me that's not what you're saying!!!