Sorry, Gamestop, That’s Not How It Works [Stealing Stuff You Paid For]

You know, I try to cut Gamestop some slack. Sure, I know about how they open games to keep discs behind the counter. I even know how they let their employees rent games which they turn around and sell as “new.”  This… this is something else. In case you can’t open the link, here’s what’s reported. Gamestop, probably the biggest game-centric company in the country, has openly admitted that they’ve been stealing free game vouchers from copies of Deus Ex (for OnLive), then turning around and selling them as new. Their excuse is that “We don’t make a habit of promoting competitive services without a formal partnership.”

Well, I’m sorry, but screw you. If they didn’t want to support a competitive service than someone at Gamestop should have passed on selling the game. It’s that simple. Someone messed up and they’re passing the  buck onto the consumer with a great back shaft up their backside and a middle finger to OnLive.

What eats me, though, isn’t that I won’t be getting a free copy of the game — I’m not planning on buying it for any platform — but that this is flat-out, brazen theft. I don’t care if it’s a competing service or not. Gamestop doesn’t get to decide what get included in their game box. It’s not their product to change up and modify. What’s next, they take the extra controller out of the 360 package because “good enough” is really good enough? To hell with that. Publishers and manufacturers get to decide their products, Gamestop just gets to shill them.

I was never one to hate on Gamestop. I prefer them over the cheapness that is Walmart and the giant openness that is Best Buy. They are small, and concentrated, and have what I want at a discount with trade-ins, plus a bunch of stuff the big guys would never even consider carrying. That’s a good formula. This, though… this makes it worth going somewhere else to buy they game. At least there you’ll get what you pay for.

OnLive and Square, I hope you sue these A-holes.