As many of you who shop at Gamestop might have noticed, Steam is now putting out giftcards that gamers can purchase to add money to their steam wallet. This is a pretty smart move for a variety of reasons; gamers who lack the ability to use a credit card regularly or might not trust online shopping, can now start seeing the alluring evil that is the famous Steam sale. This makes a lot of sense for Valve to do this but you may be asking yourself why is Gamestop allowing this to be sold in their stores? It would seem that Gamestop and Valve are competitors in the game market. This is very true but let’s dig a bit deeper than that.
Most of Gamestop’s money is made from pre-orders. If you have ever set foot in a Gamestop before then you have undoubtedly been asked if you were looking into any pre-orders or if there were any games coming out soon that you wanted to put money down on. The employees frequently ask customers to pre-order something, which results in plenty of sales. What does this have to do with Steam cards? Everything. Most PC gamers will just use Steam and other online resources to get their games and almost never go to Gamestop. Now PC gamers will have a reason to pop their heads in looking to buy a present for their gamer friend and maybe end up scrounging through old N64 games for nostalgia sake while slowly being convinced to put some moolah aside for Black Ops 2. It’s quite ingenious on both sides of the coin.
