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GameStop won't sell consoles bundled with digital games
Perhaps more than any other retailer, Gamestop has serious clout when it comes to selling video games. The retail chain makes money hand over fist on game trade-ins and the resulting used game sales, and in an effort to protect that, it's made an edict that it'll only sell bundles that include a physical disc rather than a download code. In a shareholders call (PDF), chief operating officer Tony Bartel specifically cited the current Madden '16 Xbox One bundle. Rather than carrying the official deal, the company worked to offer a free physical copy of the annual football title with the purchase of a PlayStation 4 or Xbox One, refusing to stock the digital bundle at all.
GameStop explains how it made $724 million selling digital games and add-ons
It turns out that when a GameStop exec opens their mouth, it doesn't have to be controversial after all. Case in point: company president Tony Bartel recently broke down exactly how the brick-and-mortar retailer makes money selling digital goods in its physical stores; a figure to the tune of $724.4 million. Bartel tells GamesBeat that over 70 percent of the season passes for game developer-and-publisher Ubisoft came not from purchases made through each console's respective marketplace like you'd imagine, but through retail stores. What's more, he says that many customers actually like being up-sold (he describes it as "discoverability") on future downloadable content (DLC) packs at the time of pre-order or purchase, and he has the numbers to back it up too -- some 30 percent of all of Watch Dogs' catch-all DLC tickets were bought from his stores. If you notice the store's clerks are a little more pushy than normal when you put a deposit down for Assassin's Creed: Unity, well, now you'll know why. [Image credit: Moe_/Flickr]
