ps5 gamestop membership, does it help?

[melodicmizery]

for the sake of discussion and boredom i was in gamestop the other day and i asked about ps5s. i still never got one, i bought another house recently so i just gave up on wasting hours online when they sell out in minutes. he said basically if you pay for a gamestop membership, youll have a better chance of getting a ps5 because instead of them selling out in minutes youll have about a 5 minute mark before they are sold out because having a membership will slow down the people who are re-selling them.

not trusting anything gamestop has said my entire life i was wondering if there was any truth to this out of curiosity. 

[AvengedEvil]

Sounds like complete BS to me.

[PooPooBlast]

 

27 minutes ago, melodicmizery said:

he said basically if you pay for a gamestop membership, youll have a better chance of getting a ps5 because instead of them selling out in minutes youll have about a 5 minute mark before they are sold out because having a membership will slow down the people who are re-selling them.

[Edited] 

 

I stand corrected by the reply below. Seems like there's different policies between GameStop Canada and US. 

Edited September 1, 2021 by PooPooBlast

[Lordguwa]

all of the ps5's now sold from gamestop.com require a pro membership (does have greater odd's over other choice methods). 

only bad thing: stuck with whatever bundle they choose (have seen some good or bad ones).

[ExHaseo]

Requiring a membership and forcing you to buy an unnecessarily large bundle makes gamestop probably the worst place to get one anyway.

 

I could have gotten one through gamestop a couple months ago, but the cheapest bundle for a disc version was around $800. To top it off it came with dumb stuff like an extra controller (which I wont need since I'll be the only one playing it), a cheap looking headset (which I don't need), a game I had absolutely no interest in that was going to be worthless immediately (I want to say it was a Madden game), a gamestop gift card, and you had to pay the extra for the membership. Unless you were planning on buying all of those specific things anyway, it's an enormous ripoff. You're better off just trying to get one elsewhere.

[mcnichoj]

10 hours ago, ExHaseo said:

Requiring a membership and forcing you to buy an unnecessarily large bundle makes gamestop probably the worst place to get one anyway.

 

I could have gotten one through gamestop a couple months ago, but the cheapest bundle for a disc version was around $800. To top it off it came with dumb stuff like an extra controller (which I wont need since I'll be the only one playing it), a cheap looking headset (which I don't need), a game I had absolutely no interest in that was going to be worthless immediately (I want to say it was a Madden game), a gamestop gift card, and you had to pay the extra for the membership. Unless you were planning on buying all of those specific things anyway, it's an enormous ripoff. You're better off just trying to get one elsewhere.

Because of bundles is how I got my launch Switch and my second PS5.

Yeah they suck but I wouldn't have got these consoles either way.

 

That bundle price doesn't add up unless it was a super nice headset. Disc console, two games (SMMM and Ratchet), controller and $50 gift card were all $800. If they were giving you a nice headset but you really had no use for it, could have probably sold it. Unopened games you can easily bring to stores like Walmart or Target without a receipt for full amount back. While you won't immediately need a second controller, could become useful for boosting trophies or down the line when the controller bundled with the console inevitably breaks or has some type of problem.

Honestly bundles are gonna be peoples best option unless they want to waste a lot of time over many months trying to get a console without the extras.

[ExHaseo]

2 hours ago, mcnichoj said:

Because of bundles is how I got my launch Switch and my second PS5.

Yeah they suck but I wouldn't have got these consoles either way.

 

That bundle price doesn't add up unless it was a super nice headset. Disc console, two games (SMMM and Ratchet), controller and $50 gift card were all $800. If they were giving you a nice headset but you really had no use for it, could have probably sold it. Unopened games you can easily bring to stores like Walmart or Target without a receipt for full amount back. While you won't immediately need a second controller, could become useful for boosting trophies or down the line when the controller bundled with the console inevitably breaks or has some type of problem.

Honestly bundles are gonna be peoples best option unless they want to waste a lot of time over many months trying to get a console without the extras.

And that's how they trick people into paying for the bundles full of stuff they don't want. You would have gotten the consoles eventually, it just would have taken more time.

 

A headset doesn't have to be nice to be expensive, and they can easily price gouge to make the bundles cost whatever they want. It was a brand I didn't recognize that I highly doubt could have been sold for the value. Plus it would have taken money to buy a box and shipping if it did sell. Not to mention the effort and risk that comes with leaving the house these days. 

 

The bundle I saw only had the one game, and no matter how many games are included, it's only worth it if you were going to buy those specific games at full price anyway.

 

Returning something to a store where you didn't buy it is stealing. I'm not okay with doing that. I also worked at Walmart for years when I was younger. You don't get money back when you do that, you only get store credit. If you do it too often, you can also get banned from the store. They can also refuse. Like, you can't bring in a TV without a receipt. Some cases will even get the cops called. Since it's assumed the goods are stolen.

 

The bundle I saw may have had 2 extra controllers. It's irrelevant what was in the bundle. No matter what, I don't need any more than one controller. Buying a second controller just for trophies is a waste of money to me. Trophies aren't that serious. It's not worth an extra $70+ to maybe get some trophies easier. Controllers also don't "inevitably" break. My original Gamecube, Dreamcast, PS1, PS2, PS3, PS4, original Xbox, and 360 controllers all still work. The only controller I've had that's broken in the last 20 years is my Joy Con, and that's really just because they're inherently flawed on a design level. If your controllers break that regularly, then that's on you. Being forced to buy something that you may or may not need down the line isn't okay either way. Especially since it could be cheaper by the time it's actually needed.

 

Being forced to buy a gift card is also insane. They're not only forcing you to give them more money than you would have otherwise, but also forcing you to come back and spend the gift card. The magic of gift cards is that when someone has a gift card, they always either spend less than the amount on the card and let it go to waste, or spend more than the card. Either way, the company makes more than just the sale of the gift card.

 

Supporting this kind of anti-consumer behavior isn't really any better than just buying from a scalper. Either way, you're getting screwed on a product and being forced to pay more than what it's worth. As well as encouraging these practices in the future.

[mcnichoj]

14 hours ago, ExHaseo said:

Supporting this kind of anti-consumer behavior isn't really any better than just buying from a scalper. Either way, you're getting screwed on a product and being forced to pay more than what it's worth. As well as encouraging these practices in the future.

I'm just gonna skip everything else and narrow in on this since it's not even worth going back and forth on everything else.

It's completely different buying a bundle from a scalper. You're incentivizing scalpers to do this type of stuff in the future. A kid sold millions of dollars worth of PS5's and Pokemon cards during the pandemic. After taxes and the cost of the stuff he bought to resell, he ends up with over six digits of income while still in high school. All that for what? So other consumers had to pay more. You think he isn't going to continue scalping in the future making that kind of money at his age? I wouldn't be surprised if he had hundreds of Switch OLED models ordered already.

At least when you buy a bundle from a retailer, you're getting everything at MSRP.

I ended up having to buy $250-ish more of product to buy a PS5 that costs $540 when you include the tax. Half of that extra money I'll get back from another store which I don't weep for them missing out less than two hundred dollars when they rack in billions every year. They were gonna end up with massive amounts of unsold copies of video games down the line anyway, doubt they care. I in turn can use that money back on products they have in their store I would have bought anyway like food or maybe even other games. Like I already said, I can use the controller as probably most other people could too. Then the GS gift card I can just use to buy a PS card, owners of a PS5 could probably do a lot with that.

In the end did I really waste any money? If you calculate it all in the end maybe they add an additional ten dollars give or take but then they give out free shipping which probably would have been $14 even for the slowest shipping based on the weight of the console.

 

"Time is money" but also money is time. You could look at the extra bundle money as a sort of "time tax". If you have the patience to wait till consoles are readily available in physical stores with nothing included, more power to you. Although if you're less patient it's important to do what hurts your bottom line the least. The bundle I got for the PS5 I could justify everything in it for myself. Mind you this was my second PS5 and was an impulse buy since it's a year later and it's still so hard to find. I feel sorry for those people that are wasting their time feverishly refreshing websites, following ten different twitter accounts waiting for alerts or any other craziness they have to do just to secure the new console. I've been there, waiting hours in front of stores out in the cold to try and get a Wii just to be told they didn't get any in the new shipment completely sucks. I wish they had bundles back then. Scalping wasn't nearly as bad as it is now but hey whatever disincentives other people from buying the console and gives someone else a chance.

 

Lets forget for a second that I had a console from launch that wasn't apart of a bundle. Lets pretend that my bundle console was the first time I got one. From each of our perspectives we see the other person as "dumb". I think you're dumb for not taking the bundle and you see me as dumb for taking the bundle. By you not taking the bundle you give a chance for those like willing to take the bundle to get the console.

We can't objectively say if the person taking the bundle made the right decision but we can say objectively that at the end of the day that the person that took the bundle has the console and the person that didn't, doesn't have one. As long as you don't mind the end result you got and are subjectively happy with the decision you made then that's all that matters I guess.

[BinBinricecake]

To my knowledge, if you have a pro membership, it ensures you have a window to humanely put in an order before bots go crazy for about 5-30 minutes. They did a similar thing with GPU's. Seem like one of the few ways to get things close to msrp. And you are forced to buy bundles for the ps5? From the chances I was given, all I had were the options to buy either the disc or digital versions. Nothing else came with it. Didn't put an order in as I don't feel like buying one right now.

 

tl:dr: It can. However, it's on short notice. Either you have email notifications on your phone or that's that.

[funboy1246]

its gamestop. they're sinking faster by the day. he's probably just telling you that to get you to buy a membership cause if they dont sell enought they get fired.

[AJ_Radio]

2 hours ago, funboy1246 said:

its gamestop. they're sinking faster by the day. he's probably just telling you that to get you to buy a membership cause if they dont sell enought they get fired.

 

GameStop. Piss poor management at that company. They used to be better, but that was a long time ago.