GAME: Trade-in drives 60% of new game sales

More than half of GAME’s customers use trade-ins to fund purchases of new titles, the firm has told MCV.

CEO Ian Shepherd revealed the specialist retail giant’s pre-owned offer was a key driver in all sales over the competitive Christmas period.

He highlighted trade-in as a real point of difference” between GAME and its biggest competitors.

Even in the run-up to Christmas, when you would think most of our customers are buying games new in order to give them as gifts, you still have a lot of trade-in happening,” Shepherd told MCV.

Around 50 to 60 per cent of the time, when we were selling a brand new game we were taking in a trade-in against it.”

The GAME boss dismissed the notion that new players in the pre-owned market, such as Tesco, Argos and Asda, were a threat.

Instead, he claimed the advent of rival trade-in schemes has actually benefited the Group’s own business.

We’ve got a very strong competitive advantage over companies that can’t do trade-in in the way that we can,” he said. We’ve built up a real body of expertise and experience over the last 15 to 20 years. That makes our pre-owned offer hard to replicate.

When you look on a store-by-store basis, at areas where our multi-outlet competitors have started doing trade-ins, if anything our own trade-in business has got bigger.

Those companies have added credibility to the concept of pre-owned, making consumers more aware of the benefits. They’ve actually made the market bigger and we’ve taken a good chunk of that.”