Marketing Casualties: Chaos Wars For Gamestop Only
Those of us attracted to niche titles should already be familiar with this situation, as it has happened before to titles like Nintendo's Electroplankton and Natsume's Chulip. O3 Entertainment will finally be releasing the PS2 JSRPG Chaos Wars on April 24th, but as a recent Game Informer (Issue 180, Page 56) advertisement revealed, the title will be marketed solely through Gamestop.
For the uninitiated, Chaos Wars acts similar to Namco x Capcom from being a strategy game featuring characters from a variety of other game series, to include: Gun Grave, Gakuen Toshi Vara Noir, Blazing Souls, Generation of Chaos, Growlanser, Shadow Hearts and Shinki Gensou Spectral Souls.
I am more than a bit miffed by this. Gamers should be able to outsource their retailer of choice, whether it is a corporate / local brick-and-mortar retailer or an online source. Selecting Gamestop exclusively also seems like an odd choice. As Chaos Wars was nearing it's original ship date in November of last year, it became available for pre-order through Best Buy. Coincidentally, the link still exists.
Routinely, I have been looking for a non-AAA Title only to find that both my local and regional Gamestop/EBGames stores do not and will not carry it. Sure, I could order online, but even there some titles fail to appear. Just try searching for a copy of UFO Interactive's Heavenly Guardian on Gamestop's site.
Additionally, Gamestop has the unsavory habit of jacking up esoteric game prices by $5 to $10, as was seen initially with the release of SNK's Neo Geo Battle Colosseum, King of Fighters XI, and Agetec's Fire Pro Wrestling Returns.
This may just be my pessimistic side coming through, but, as a consumer, I find value in both choice and discretion.
Chaos Wars to be GameStop exclusive [Siliconera]
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Posted to Video Games on 18 March 2008
· Comments (4)
Other stuff like this: Chaos Wars, exclusive, gamestop, ps2, SRPG
Name: Dave
I'm sorry, but who was the idiot that decided not to bring over Namco x Capcom (both companies very popular among US and Europe gamers) while this game bringing together more obscure series does get released?
I assume that it was the same idiot that passed on SegaGaGa.
lol...I remember when Dave Eggers started releasing his books only at small booksellers. I guess video games are going in the opposite direction.
While I normally despise any action that gives Gamestop an advantage, I can understand why O3 (ozone?) Entertainment has gone this route. As you said in your article, this game appeals to a niche, meaning small, audience. If this game were made available to every chain of stores where you can buy games, but only enough copies were made to satisfy the niche audience (thus optimizing profit by minimizing cost), you'd have at most one or two copies per store. This would be rather infuriating for the consumer as he/she goes from store to store, only to find that the one or two copies have been snatched up.
By limiting the places where it is available (one national chain of small stores with an online arm), it centralizes the distribution, cuts down on shipping costs, but still makes it easy for the consumer to locate a copy.