Om nog even terug te komen op het retail mechanisme. Hier is een interessant artikeltje dat jaren terug verscheen op Gamecenter. Het is een van de weinige echte pareltjes die je op internet kan vinden over de werkelijke gang van zaken in de gaming industry. Ik weet niet of het nog te vinden is, daarom post ik hier maar even.
Ja, het is lang maar ik post dit soort dingen liever in z'n geheel om misverstanden te voorkomen.
Gamecenter takes a behind-the-
scenes look at game merchandising in retail stores. The costs will surprise you.
Distribution and Compliance
No one can get a game into the retail channel without greasing a few outstretched palms along the way.
Shelf Space
The best games get the most prominent displays, right? Wrong. Publishers pay dearly just to get their games on the shelf. Premium positioning costs even more.
Shelf Life
Ever wonder why games are hyped so much before they're shipped? Simple: games have only a matter of weeks to prove themselves big sellers.
Rebates and Returns
Publishers aren't out of the woods even after they've spent buckets of money to get their games to consumers. If the game doesn't sell fast enough to suit retailers, they will simply dump their inventory back onto the publisher.
The Fallout
Why should gamers care how much it costs to market a game? Well, who do you think ends up paying those costs in the long run?
Editor's Note (12/1/99):
This story was originally published nearly one year ago, but it still holds true. Although a significant number of games are now sold over the Internet, the biggest players in e-commerce also have the type of brick-and-mortar operations in which publishers must pay serious money just to buy shelf space. One way to ensure you get the best prices on your game and game hardware purchases is to use Gamecenter's Game Shopper service.
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by Bill Meyer
(12/11/98)
With development budgets now climbing into the millions of dollars, everybody's talking about how much it costs to create games for PCs and consoles these days. But there's another cost factor that gets much less attention, at least outside the industry: Once a game is finished, the game's publisher must drop another bundle of dough to squeeze the game into the overcrowded retail channel.
Chalk it up to the principle of supply and demand: too many games and too little space on retailers' shelves--and retailers are making the most of the situation. As a result, game publishers are spending major bills on in-store merchandising at the nation's most prominent retailers in order to capture the attention of consumers.
What do we mean by "major bills"? Well, the total marketing budget for an A-list game can range from $1 to $2 million. That includes all marketing and advertising (print and possibly TV). Of that amount, $500,000 or more could be spent on what is known as market development, a company's efforts to raise consumer awareness of a new game. Market development funds (MDFs) are spent on such things as presale promotions, in-store displays, mail-in cash rebates, and securing space within retailers' print advertisements. Such are the requirements these days for a publisher to secure the biggest orders and the best shelf placement at major software retailers.
When you're talking about that kind of money, it's understandable that many developers can't afford the price of admission; this is also why you see top-shelf developers such as id Software and talented newcomers such as Valve partnering up with deep-pocketed publishers such as Activision and Sierra On-Line, respectively. But this prohibitive cost of doing business raises some important questions. Are great games falling through the cracks because their publishers can't get shelf space? Are the games displayed front and center at your local Babbages, Best Buy, Electronics Boutique, or CompUSA really the best games the industry has to offer? Do retailers ever take chances promoting a potential diamond in the rough, or do they count only on what they consider to be safe sequels from heavyweight publishers? And the most important question of all: Are retail sales practices limiting the selection of games we can buy?
To answer these questions and more, Gamecenter went behind the scenes to talk to experts in both the publishing and retailing sides of the business. We found out just what it takes to get a game on retailers' shelves--and what happens after that. We think you'll be surprised at what we discovered; it'll have you looking at your next game purchase in a whole new light.
Designing a game seems easy compared to the effort required to get it to market.
Heavyweight Distributors
Ingram Micro
Merisel
Navarre
TechData
Publisher's Paradox
As paradoxical as it seems, designing a great game just might be simpler than bringing it to market. For small publishers such as Monolith, midsized operations such as Bethesda, and even major players with deep pockets such as Hasbro or Microsoft, distributing a game within the retail channel and complying with retailers' requirements are extremely important issues. A mistake made at this stage can seriously erode a publisher's profit margin or bust a product even before it gets out of the gate.
Distribution is neither simple nor cheap. Each of the major retailers has slightly different requirements--such as labeling boxes with custom UPC codes--to which a publisher must comply before the retailer will even consider stocking its game. "It's a challenge," said Jim Maia, Interplay's vice president of North American sales. "A lot of these small publishers don't have the in-house facilities to do all these special things to their products before they get shipped out to the national retailers, nor can they afford to use a third-party company to do it."
The industry's bigger players, publishers such as Hasbro, Electronic Arts, and Microsoft, have the clout to handle distribution on their own. They sell directly to the specialty retail chains (CompUSA, Best Buy, Babbages, Electronics Boutique, and so on) and the mass retailers (such as Kmart and Toys "R" Us), and they enjoy a bigger profit margin as a result. On the flip side, they must spend significant amounts of money to staff national sales forces, ship product to retailers' distribution centers, and warehouse and manage huge inventories.
Small and midsized publishers typically get their games into the retail channel via one or more third-party distributors. These industry middlemen, the biggest of which are Ingram Micro, Merisel, Navarre, and TechData, buy games from publishers and resell them to retailers. Distributors handle the shipping and inventory management details for the smaller publishers--for a price. Using a third-party distributor reduces the original publisher's profit margin by $3 to $5 for each copy sold, and compliance with retailers' requirements can cost even more.
Getting on the Shelf
Most retail outlets, however, deal with only a single distributor. CompUSA, for instance, uses Navarre, while Wal-Mart contracts with GT Interactive (which is, of course, itself a game publisher). In the latter case, GT Interactive acts as a "rack jobber" (stocking and managing the games on Wal-Mart's shelves). This gives GT Interactive tremendous influence over which games make it onto Wal-Mart's shelves.
This means that small to midsized publishers who can't sell direct to retailers must negotiate deals with several distributors--including GT Interactive--if they want to get their games into Wal-Mart and other popular stores. "Challenge number one," said Monolith CEO Jason Hall, "is making sure you're picked up by distribution that can get you into the larger chain retailers."
Nancy MacIntyre, Hasbro Interactive's director of sales, echoed Hall's comment. "Up until this point," said MacIntyre, "it has definitely been a challenge for small publishers to get their products on the shelf at any of those retailers, because they had to go through distribution, and the financials of that deal are very difficult."
In the case of Wal-Mart, only the publishers with the biggest sticks have been able to bypass GT. To this day, all other publishers have had to play ball with GT to get in the door. A publisher must make a decision: Does gaining access to Wal-Mart's mainstream consumers justify the expense of aligning with GT distribution? Moreover--as one competing publisher's vice president of sales, who requested anonymity, asked--is selling at Wal-Mart worth the trade-off of losing some autonomy to GT, which often dictates pricing?
Intriguing tell me more
Wal-Mart is an important chunk of the software business.
You Will Comply
Once a publisher solves its distribution problem, it's faced with the compliance issue. Many mass retailers, such as Target and Wal-Mart, have specific packaging requirements that publishers must comply with. This might mean creating a unique SKU (stock-keeping unit) for a given retailer or even coming up with a different sized box. Printing more than one box is a considerable expense, but every publisher with whom we spoke agreed that it can be worth the cost if it means getting your game into the more than 2,000 Wal-Mart stores across the United States.
"Most publishers are willing to do a lot to be successful there," said Beth Featherstone, marketing manager at Microsoft Games. "Wal-Mart is an important chunk of the software business; they move an awful lot of product besides Deer Hunter." Publishers have a choice: comply with these retailers' demands, or ignore them and risk not getting their games in front of the consumers who shop in these stores.
Game content represents yet another hurdle, especially at stores that cater to families, such as Toys "R" Us and Wal-Mart. For instance, despite its plum relationship with Wal-Mart, GT Interactive couldn't convince the chain to carry its game Blood II: The Chosen, even though the word blood was purposely obscured by the game's subhead..
A Limited-Time Special Offer!
Publishers must deal with other compliance issues. For example, more and more retailers are demanding that publishers promote their games with special incentives, such as mail-in cash rebates or T-shirts. Because these are typically promoted with stickers on the box and/or coupons in the box, they represent an extra expense above and beyond the cost of the T-shirts or rebates themselves. But when such special requests will either make or break a deal or significantly impact the number of copies a major retail chain is willing to order, most publishers will grin and bear such schemes. For instance, this holiday season Microsoft is bundling a free copy of its electronic encyclopedia, The World of Flight, plus a $20-mail-in rebate offer with its Flight Simulator 98 in an effort to sell more copies of what's becoming an older game.
But retailers aren't restricting their demands for these kinds of special offers to older titles. Many are asking publishers to come up with unique presale promotions for hot upcoming games. This means not only that publishers have to come up with different offers for different retailers, but that each retailer wants a juicier promotion so it can one-up its competitors. "You have a situation," said MacIntyre, "where retailers want to be able to give consumers a reason to drive across town past five Wal-Marts and a Target to their CompUSA or Best Buy. It's definitely out of control, but at the end of the day, I'm not sure if it's a bad or a good thing."
Other publishers are less ambivalent about this issue, contending that presale giveaways are getting out of hand because retailers large and small are beginning to expect them. A marketing vice president at one major publisher, who requested anonymity, said that mass merchandisers are now intent on competing with the smaller specialty software stores for the hard-core gamer (defined as someone who buys ten or more games each year). "Imagine if Toys "R" Us got that guy, instead of the kid shopping with his mom."
Interestingly enough, one of the major players among retailers--Jerry Madeo, vice president of PC merchandising for Electronics Boutique--also believes giveaways have gone too far. "I hope we can still go backward on that," Madeo told Gamecenter.
You mean publishers pay to get their games on the shelf?
It takes big money just to put a game on the shelf at a major retailer.
Have you ever wondered why some games sit lonely on a shelf, while others are put in huge displays at the end of aisles, arranged in massive pyramids on the floor, or prominently exhibited in storefront windows? There's a simple answer. The retail marketing of games is really no different than the retail marketing of videos, CDs, or bananas: Publishers put up serious money to buy this premium retail space--in the form of end-caps, product stacks and towers, and window displays--for their games.
The price of such high-profile merchandising vehicles varies with the season, reaching its zenith during the holidays. "Everything is negotiable," said a vice president of marketing who requested anonymity, "but [retailers] definitely jack things up [during the holidays]. In July, for instance, an end-cap at CompUSA costs $30,000 to $40,000. In October, November, December, and January, those things go up to $90,000. Standees [standing cardboard cutouts of game characters] cost $30,000. They kill you."
Why so much? Here again, it's the simple law of supply and demand: retailers have only so much floor space, and they know publishers will pay dearly to get the best real estate for their products. "You can do all the advertising in the world," said MacIntyre, "but if the product isn't merchandised properly at retail, if customers can't easily find it, you have a problem." Madeo agreed: "In some respects, it's going to get lost on the shelf. You have to do something to let people to know your game is in the store."
The Reasoning Behind Sequels
Not every inch of retail shelf space is for sale--technically. Retailers, after all, make the most of their money by selling merchandise, not floor space. But each chain, from the specialty stores and the mass merchants to the warehouse outlets (such as Costco and Sam's Club), can commit only so much space--and so much inventory capital--to games. One way publishers can influence buyers to stock their games--commonly known as "selling in" inventory--is by helping retailers promote the fact that the retailer offers their games for sale. Moreover, many of the salespeople we spoke with indicated that a publisher can negotiate a more favorable location for its product in the store's shelving layout by investing in specific retail marketing vehicles.
Maia calls this "in-line" advertising, and it can include buying space in a retailer's mail-order catalog, paying to be included in the retailer's advertisements, purchasing "shelf talkers" (those cardboard ads that jut out into the aisle), and more. "I get a lot of product into retail that I don't have to pay for, and so do other publishers," he explained. "But at the end of the day, you're paying for everything. I can buy a section and put my budget in because they have it for sale."
Our anonymous marketing VP broke down some typical numbers for us: For a brand-new title, a publisher will typically spend at least $10,000 for in-line advertising and in-store promotions to sell in 2,000 units; $15,000 to sell in 4,000 units; $25,000 to sell in 8,000 units; and $50,000 to sell in 20,000 units. Publishers selling in a likely hit--the much-anticipated sequel to a previous hit game, for example--need a much smaller MDF, because consumer awareness of the game is already high. In this situation, it's not unusual for a large retailer to order 60,000 to 100,000 units while requiring only a $10,000 MDF.
"If you have a great product," according to our source, "your MDF comes way down." Games like Quake III and Tomb Raider III, for example, are given end-caps for free. It's the freshman publisher who is going to get zapped.
Where does that leave the independents?
With so much money at stake, publishers can't afford to rely on low-paid retail clerks.
The Low Ball
As you can imagine, it can be mighty tough for a small publisher to get the ear of a buyer at one of the retail behemoths. Everyone we spoke with, however, told us that the best independents aren't completely shut out. But if a major retailer does buy an unproven game, they'll buy only limited quantities--unless the publisher is willing to invest sizable marketing development funds.
"They can drive a hard bargain" said Hall, "especially if they know you really need to get your game in there, and they're not really excited about it. [As a publisher] you better have your negotiating hat on." According to Madeo, this is simply the nature of retail. "Being a game retailer," he said, "it's kind of a given that if a game looks decent, we're going to give it a try. It's really a question of going from a conservative order of 1,200 units to a more aggressive and noticeable order of 2,400 units. The bottom line is this: We're looking at publishers to put their money where their mouths are."
Maia didn't mince words, either. "If the retailer feels there's a consumer need," he said, "they're going to play ball. But if some guy walks in saying 'Look, I've got a Snoopy screensaver!' one of two things is going to happen: he's either going to get raped or laughed out of the building."
Guns for Hire
So, a publisher has dropped a major wad on end-caps, shelf talkers, window displays, standees, and other bits of in-store marketing at all the major retailers. All that's left to do now is watch the sales revenue roll in, right? Well, not quite yet. There's yet another factor to be considered in the retail shelf-space equation: contract store merchandisers.
Many publishers sign on with these types of companies (Reps Unlimited and Strategic Marketing Partners being two of the biggest) to ensure that their marketing plans are actually being carried out. This is accomplished by sending representatives out to each retail location to verify that end-caps are in place and fully stocked, that window displays are up, and so on. You might not think a publisher would have to go to such lengths to ensure it's getting what it paid for, but all of our sources agreed on this point: with so much money at stake, publishers can't afford to rely on low-paid retail clerks who aren't in their employ in the first place.
As usual, it's not cheap. Each store visit costs about $15, according to Maia. With a chain such as CompUSA, which has 200 stores in the United States--or a mass retailer such as Wal-Mart--the expenses can mount quickly. "It can be a fairly substantial percentage of your market funds," said MacIntyre, "if you buy into the fact that in-store presentation is as important as anything else in terms of driving sales."
Hey, this %$#@ ain't movin'!
Just like milk and butter in the grocery store, games have limited shelf life.
Games might not have freshness dates stamped on their boxes, but retailers are willing to keep a game on their shelves only as long as it's selling. And the time they're allowing for a game to prove itself is getting shorter and shorter.
These days, it's about a month at the outside. Some publishers would argue that it's more like two weeks. If consumers aren't buying the game in satisfactory numbers, the retailer might ask the publisher to fund a mail-in rebate or some new in-store marketing promotion, or even take the product back--with a full refund to the retailer, of course. Anyway you cut it, the publisher is forced to spend even more money if the game doesn't quickly prove to be a hot seller.
The publisher's best protection against this kind of pressure is to commit a significant MDF up front, to give the game time to find an audience. "We cannot just unilaterally make a change," said Madeo. "When they [the publisher] signed up, they signed up. If retailers started playing those games, we couldn't collect a dime for anything."
According to MacIntyre, retailers demand hot-selling games because they're "graded on only one thing: how much sales volume they're driving per square foot of retail space." MacIntyre told us there are three pieces to this puzzle. "The first is obviously top-line sales revenue," she said. "The second is the amount of profit they're delivering from that space every day; and the third is how many marketing dollars they're deriving from that space."
Based on these criteria, retailers find themselves under tremendous pressure to stock only the hottest-selling games and to mark down or return whatever doesn't sell as quickly as they can. And with publishers churning out new games--many of them being of the "me-too" variety--at an ever faster clip, retailers never find themselves short of new product. But that doesn't mean they're always happy about it. "Sin was on the shelf for maybe a week before Half-Life came along," griped Madeo. "You used to be able to get a few months before the next big game in the same genre came out."
The Little Guy
As you've probably guessed, the short shelf-life phenomenon hurts the small and midsized publishers the most. If--even after the publisher has paid multiple distributors and expended a sizable MDF--a game doesn't catch on with consumers right away, retailers aren't going to be happy. Whereas a larger publisher might be able to take the game back and put another title into the same space or end-cap, a smaller player might not be able to fill the hole.
To avoid this scenario, many publishers couple the release of their A games with two or more B titles. Monolith's shipment of Get Medieval and Rage of Mages around the same time as Shogo: Mobile Armor Division is a perfect example of this strategy. Although it exacerbates the retail shelf-space squeeze, it gives the publisher a fall-back position if any one of the games proves to be a dud at retail. Basically, the publisher can pay for the promotion of one game by discounting the price of another. "If you have a series of titles coming out every quarter," explained Hall, "any sort of price shifting that has to occur can be bounced against new products going into the channel."
Even publishers that have multiple products can lose out if they can't respond quickly enough to the retailers' demands, as often happens when they're forced to rely on third-party distributors. The long and short of it: the days of breaking in with one game and releasing just one A-list title a year are gone forever.
What happens to games that don't sell?
When a game doesn't sell in quantities large enough to satisfy the big retailers, all the unsold inventory boomerangs back to the publisher.
Each of the publishers we talked to agreed that most of the rules of the retail game are fair. They readily accept the distribution costs, the retail marketing expenses, and even short shelf life as part of their cost of doing business. There was, however, one issue that raised the hackles of all the publishers we spoke to: each of them--some on the record, some off--told us they thought the retail industry's policies on product returns are wildly unrealistic.
As we described earlier, when a publisher ships games to retailers, the publisher is said to be selling in those units to the channel. When retailers sell those games to their customers, they're said to be "selling through" those same units. When gauging a game's commercial success or failure, sell-through numbers mean everything and sell-in numbers mean nothing. Why? Because retailers retain the right to return to the publisher any games they don't sell through to the consumer. In other words, the collective retail channel could order 500,000 copies of a given game from a publisher, but if those retailers succeed only in selling 50,000 copies to consumers, the publisher could end up on the hook for 450,000 returns.
"I hate the fact that the product can come back," said Hall. "That is just the hardest part of the industry. If I sold the product to them, they bought it. It should never come back. But that's not how it works." Maia echoed Hall's comments. "When does the retailer's responsibility start and ours end?" he asked. "Returns are knocking a lot of the profitability out of our business."
Retailers, for their part, defend their return policies by accusing publishers of making unrealistic sales projections for their games. "The publishers are basically pushing more out the door than they should," said Madeo. "They're all competing for the same customer's attention, and they're all going to extremes they shouldn't be going to."
The Real Reasons for Returns
In fact, there are a number of complex reasons why product returns are so high. First, there are just too many games on the market. According to market research firm PC Data, there are on the average 3,500 new games in the retail channel at any one time. The problem is, consumers are really interested in buying perhaps only a third of those new games--the rest are destined to become returns.
Second, publishers and retailers point to the constant cycle of product obsolescence and revision. "It's almost like the planned obsolescence of products creates a situation where you're always going to have returns," said MacIntyre, "even on your best-selling games." Although it's considered good business to build a franchise, such as EA's Madden Football or Eidos's Tomb Raider series, mainstream consumers can quickly become confused as to which games are which.
Finally, several sources told us that high-profile marketing promotions--the very vehicles designed to boost sell-through rates--sometimes end up creating abnormally high returns. Here's how: When retailers participate in an in-store marketing promotion, they usually order much more inventory than they normally would have. And in order to keep the end-cap, product stack, or in-store display looking neat and tidy, they might continue to order large numbers of units to keep those displays stocked. The problem arises when the promotion ends, according to MacIntyre. "[Retailers] are going to want to adjust their inventory back down to their everyday levels," she said, "so they're likely to return most of the units they haven't sold by the end of the promotion period. Just returning that balance can wipe out all the profits the publisher expected to make on the promotion in the first place."
The Alternatives to Returns
Because returns are anathema to publishers, retailers sometimes agree to a lesser evil: mail-in cash rebates. In this scenario, the publisher offers to rebate to buyers a portion of the game's retail price--provided they comply with a raft of conditions. Lately, cash rebates have turned extreme, with Blizzard offering $24 cash rebates on games--Diablo and WarCraft II--that are selling at retail for $26. Sierra Sports is going even further, offering limited-time 100 percent rebates to buyers willing to trade in other sports games. Obviously, both publishers must be crossing their fingers and hoping that many consumers will either forget or won't bother to send in for these rebates, but the practice of giving away games or selling them for next to nothing isn't good for either publishers or retailers in the long run.
"Because of the situation with returns being so high and the continual flood of new titles into the market, retailers and publishers alike are forced to engage in marketing behavior that may not always be the best business decision," noted MacIntyre.
So where do we go from here?
Here's the bottom line of retail marketing: Gamers end up paying these marketing costs, even if they don't buy the games that failed in the marketplace.
Now that we have a reasonably good idea of how the retail business works, specifically as it relates to games, we can tackle some of the more general questions as to how these practices will shape the future of game development. Perhaps the most important question to ask is whether the tremendous costs represented by in-store marketing, returns, and rebates will make it impossible for smaller, independent publishers to compete.
Not surprisingly, Hall predicts small publishers can still make it, even in the face of these tremendous hurdles. "My experience has been that retailers are interested in helping make Monolith successful," he said. "The big-name publishers will tell you that there's some majestic rocket science to this. There's not. It's really just about being able to negotiate, being able to follow through with contracts, and being timely. A lot of the stuff is cut-and-dried. The big publishers create this mystique to keep people like Monolith out of the market. I'm sure us doing our thing doesn't necessarily make them happy."
MacIntyre's view matches Hall's, albeit with considerable qualifications: "If you support a title with MDF, retailers will put it on end-caps, advertise the product in their preprints and catalogs, and really get behind it to help you build a business. But there's a risk/reward ratio there for them as well as for you." Retailers, according to MacIntyre, believe quality is the most important factor when they're considering how many units to buy and where to place them in their stores. And specialty retailers such as Electronics Boutique, she told us, are very interested in picking tomorrow's classic game--and they're willing to deal with a smaller publisher if that's what it takes.
But that's not necessarily the case with the mass merchants such as Wal-Mart, and these outlets are wielding more and more clout in the industry simply because of the huge volumes of product they're capable of moving. "If you can't get your game in those outlets," said MacIntyre, "you may not have the chance to make your product a success." But does every publisher have access? "If you are a new publisher with an unproven track record, it is extremely difficult to get a new game in the mass merchants," explained Carter Lipscomb, director of sales at Ripcord Games. "The slots at the mass merchants are reserved for the big name publishers' blockbuster titles."
Even more worrisome, MacIntyre said, is the fact that mass retailers "are making determinations about what should go on the shelf based on historical information as opposed to what the quality of the game actually is." In other words, if one type of game sells well, Wal-Mart is going to order a lot of the next installation in that franchise, as well as plenty of knockoffs, whether they're critical successes or not.
And therein lies the ugly truth for hard-core gamers: We can demand and praise quality and originality until we're blue in the face, but if the masses continue to vote for sequels with their wallets, the industry is going to respond by producing more and more sequels and knockoffs. Call it the Deer Hunter phenomenon. "Most of the growth in PC games' sales is occurring with mass-market titles," said Madeo, "games that are not on the shopping list of our typical gaming customer. [These sales] are driven by television commercials and Sunday ads. They are aimed at people who may only buy two or three games each year."
This state of affairs leaves publishers with few choices, according to Doug Lombardi, a product manager at Sierra Studios. "Should we come up with something imaginative and new," he asked, "or a sequel with hit potential that we know the press and the retailers are going to jump on?" To Sierra's credit, it's doing a little of both. Of the two products that Lombardi is managing, Half-Life is a major leap forward within the 3D first-person shooter genre popularized by Doom and Quake, and Homeworld is shaping up to be an even bigger leap forward within the real-time strategy genre exemplified by WarCraft and Command & Conquer.
For many other publishers, success means extending aging franchises and sticking with tried-and-true (and tired) formulas. "Every publisher has to have a franchise," maintained Baldwin. "You've got to have that big boy to be able to play." Publishers who don't have such games risk never gaining admittance to mass-market retailers. Unfortunately, this need to establish familiar franchises is rendering the industry boring and stagnant. And, although production values are at their highest ever, creativity and originality are sliding into the toilet. "It's kind of a shame," admitted Lombardi, "because gamers are just as interested in variety as in hits."
Baldwin, describing the game industry's uneasy but growing infatuation with the mass-market retailers, may have summed it up best: "There's a good and bad," he said. "The good is maybe in a couple of years, when you go get a Slurpee, you can buy Tomb Raider V. The bad news is that it's Tomb Raider V."
So what do you think? Give us your opinion about the rules of retail on the CNET Message Boards.
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