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$50 bill or videogame?

February 9, 2009 More on John Marmaduke's keynote at the Future of Packaged Media conference last week...

Marmaduke noted that if a kid were to walk past a $50 bill and a videogame lying on the sidewalk, most kids would pick up the game and leave the $.

This was by way of illustrating the value kids (his word, which I take to mean those under and over 18) place on games, and to what length they will go to get them. While acknowledging the industry's videogame merchandising conundrum -- locking games up discourages sales, but shelving live merchandise invariably leads to unacceptably high shrink-- he related stories of shoppers breaking glass cases and bringing in power tools in an effort to steal games. Further complicating this issue is that videogames "are one of the only areas where sales go up when it's in the back of the store," according to Marmaduke.

"There's nothing like videogames for theft," this veteran retail says. That's backed up by EMA stats, which show videogame theft rose more than 20% in 2007, to an average shrink rate of 2.2%.

There will be more on this topic at Wednesday's Game Supply conference in Burbank.

Posted by Marcy Magiera on February 9, 2009 | Comments (0)