I’ve always thought that the pivot should have been towards making stores into spaces people actually want to spend time in and use as a hub of sorts for physical meeting. With the right tournament structures physical stores could have become spaces for physical meeting and competition that then also converts into sales and further additions to the business model, such as collabs with teams and functioning as a sort of circuit for finding upcoming talent.
Once you’ve built one working tournament structure for one game that is then something you can roll out to any other game really. Your only concern at that point is scheduling.
They didn’t really try to do anything. There’s no vision for what to do with physical stores that are losing market share to the convenience of online, they just keep changing nothing and it keeps failing.
why would you want 3rd places when you can have vestigial stores attached to a speculative financial instrument?
Yeah, there’s a bunch of things they could have done. Video game arcades. Retro video game reselling. Game console maintenance/restoration. Your idea. They could have slid in some Trading card sales/game meets into the stores. Selling PC parts/building/repair specialists for gaming PCs. Stupid how they couldn’t think of anything real to do with them.
They did some those things
TCG shops know this and I’m surprised it hasn’t transferred to video games, apart from like one arcade I went to that also had a Smash bracket the night I was there.
Yeah exactly. Who even needs a TCG shop? Nobody. You can order the cards and get them delivered. The shop survives on providing other reasons to go to its physical location.
This is the transition videogame stores need to make. The big stores franchises could have become huge circuits and dominant forces in esports but they have utterly failed to have the vision for it because the execs running these places do not actually play games in anything other than the most casual capacity so they don’t understand how it would work.
I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
