Gaming in Canada has become a bit more expensive due to the tanking of the Canadian dollar relative to the US Dollar. Games that were traditional around $59.99 have skyrocketed to upwards of $69.99-$79.99. Over the last few years of E3, there’s been some great deals where you could get $20 off or 30% off a preorder if you order a minimum of 3 games. That’s the time when many of us would preorder as many games as you possible due to the great discounts and that face that there’s no initial cost upfront. Your credit card would not be charged with anything until the game is actually shipped. There’s really no downside to just preordering any game you’re interested in. If you change your mind, just cancel the order for that specific game!
The first major retailer to announce their E3 Promotion was Best Buy Canada. I was especially interested in this as earlier this year, the sister company Future Shop (another pseudo competitor) was closed down. In effect, there was no big box store competition for Best Buy. Given that that it would come to no surprise that they would proceed to offer a terrible deal relative to previous years.
- Buy minimum 3 games, get 20% off
- Must be a reward zone member and use a unique, personal code for each day that it is applicable from June 15 – 18th. (1 code is used for each day)
A lose-lose situation for us consumers as not only has the relative price of games gone up, the discount percentage has gone DOWN. Not only that, they would also proceed to make the barriers to purchase even more difficult by forcing everyone to join their Rewards Zone program and request unique codes that will only work on a particular day. I can only imagine how many technical glitches that will result from this. Leave to Best Buy Canada to try to squeeze as much profit out of us gamers as possible. Sure it’s big business and but I don’t have any shares in Best Buys so to me, it’s simply a money grab and them taking advantage of the fact that there is no real competition anymore.
That leaves us with Amazon Canada. Thankfully, they have just announced their E3 promotion.
- Buy 2 games, get 20% off using a generic code
- Buy 3 games, get 30% off using a generic code
It’s pretty clear who the winner is. You could argue that with Amazon, you may not get the game on release day and there is more work involved if you want to return an item since there’s no physical store to go to. It doesn’t matter. The discounts are just too great to ignore. Goodbye Best Buy for me. Hopefully, with the backlash and the poor preorder sales as most informed gamers will go to Amazon, it will give Best Buy some pause on their approach to the E3 promo next year. This is why competition is good.
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