Employees at GameStop are dealing with a new issue that is making it harder to fulfil pre-orders. In general, pre-orders are one of the primary criteria that staff are judged on, but an unpleasant new development has left a lot of GameStop locations failing to fulfil those orders, with pre-ordered games sometimes arriving late or not at all.
According to Kotaku, the GameStop subreddit has received many complaints this week from staff dealing with system difficulties ranging from messed-up inventory searches to pre-order history being totally deleted before shipments arrive. According to a few workers, the saga is the result of a SAP software switch that began earlier this summer. While it was intended to consolidate several sales and logistics systems and, theoretically, improve GameStop’s back-end process, it actually generated new issues for GameStop staff.
This has resulted in retailers not having enough copies of certain games and collectibles for consumers who have already put money down on pre-orders, resulting in dissatisfied customers and a few pre-orders being cancelled at GameStop. To make matters worse, one employee claims that they can only refund cancelled pre-orders with store credit after a month, regardless of whether the consumer paid money or not.
Employees claim that this pre-order issue has harmed NBA 2K23, one of the year’s most anticipated sports games, as well as JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection. It’s been particularly difficult for more specialised titles like Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling Into Darkness and The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero, since retailers often only get copies of such games for consumers who pre-ordered them.
Customers who aren’t receiving what they paid for will undoubtedly be irritated, particularly if they don’t have easy access to digital games or other game-friendly stores. However, it might be highly concerning for the personnel concerned, who have little influence over the issue. According to one, since pre-orders are a major part in a store’s sales targets, cancelled orders might result in a poor score. “People are genuinely going into problems because of this,” they said.
All of this is made worse by the fact that the next several months will be jam-packed with big game launches. Gotham Knights, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Bayonetta 3, Sonic Frontiers, God of War Ragnarok, and Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are just a handful of the highly anticipated titles that can be pre-ordered right now, and that doesn’t even begin to cover the rest of the games due out this year.
