Online or retail? Game store in Newcastle

PS5 and Xbox series X are coming and players around the world are looking forward to them, but Newcastle’s local e-commerce does not seem to show enthusiasm for these game consoles.

After months of rumours, more and more details and information of new generation game consoles’ are exposed, players seem to be expecting them a lot, but we found that the electronics store didn’t seem to be ready for this sale.

“We don’t know too much about the next-gen consoles, we didn’t do a lot of research about it, let’s decide what to do after the consoles and new games are released.” Paul, 34, a staff of HMV who lives in Newcastle said. He has been work at HMV 5 years and he also has more than ten years of experience in the offline electrical appliance sales industry. “With the online sales came out, people think its more convenient, I mean, recent years, quite a few people came to the physical store to pick those consoles or games what they want.”

However, when the previous generation of consoles went on sale, it seemed completely different.  “During that time, when PS4 release, the market was much better.” said Paul. He remembers that at that time, as long as something was related to ps4, crowds could be seen in various electrical stores.” HMV and Sony have maintained close business relationship, especially in the past 6 years. In the past few years when the previous generation consoles were very fresh, they often held offline game sales activities at midnight, he think this is how people’s passion for games is officially produced. But nowadays, both Sony and Microsoft seem to focus on the promotion and sales of new-gen consoles on the line. “I mean, it’s a shame”, Paul said.

People no longer seem to be inclined to choose a physical store as a channel to buy a game console. We have asked 20 people in the campus of Newcastle University, 19 people will choose to gather the information of new generation consoles and games through online channels, the only one left has a similar opinion to Paul.

Dale, 29, staff of Menkind Newcastle, said they probably don’t sell the next-gen consoles but the thing related to them. “We might sell Sony and Microsoft consoles a few years ago, but now we may should only sell peripheral products.”