GAME Management “Told To Brace For The Possibility Of Administration”

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Looks like it’s probably just about over for GAME, one of the high street’s most recognisable icons for gamers. This afternoon trade magazine MCV went live with a follow up story to what we’ve all been hearing for weeks, the emphasis being that administrators are, according to the article, just around the corner, with the guys at the top getting the heads up.

“MCV has learnt that senior members of the GAME management teams have been told to brace for the possibility of administration,” wrote the site’s Ben Parfitt, who has been meticulously following the ongoing story with the company. “Senior staff were told at a meeting with CEO Ian Shepherd earlier this week that the chain has approximately two weeks to turn its fortunes around.”

This, presumably, is where all the sales are coming from.

The worst thing about all this is, as far as we can see, the guys working in the shops simply aren’t being kept up to speed, with forum posters apparently working for the group finding out the latest as the days go on by reading stories on the net and around community sites, rather than through the organisation itself – some are still hopeful for a GameSpot buy-out, and we hope this is the case.

It’s those guys that we feel for, and hope that – if all this does fall apart in a matter of weeks – that they’ll find other employment.

I was just in GAME in Falkirk and asked them if they were closing, they said no.

yeah i asked someone in GAME yesterday and they said no but when i asked my mate who works there she said they've been asked to keep it quiet as it could happen

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GAME has put itself up for sale ahead of upcoming rent payments.
“Struggling video games retailer Game has put itself up for sale,” says the report today, “as it tries to raise cash to pay a quarterly rent bill due in a fortnight.”

The Times says that Rothschild has “been appointed to find a buyer” and says that if it can’t pay the landlords, GAME could go into administration, with Deloitte lined up to “handle any insolvency process”.

The Sunday Times reports that selling in such a short timeframe “could be a problem”.

The worst part of all this? Sounds like – in one case at least – the staff don’t know anything at all, with another saying they’re having to rely on sites like MCV.

GAME’s share price has plunged to 3.5p, meaning its market value is now just over £15m, says the aforementioned trade magazine.

Where's all the cheap shit at these places?

Been to two of them and there's not much for sale.

thats weird the GAME/Gamestation near me has a sales on it started 2 weeks ago now nothing good left now

There's a decent sale on but games like COD, Fifa, WWE 12, UFC 3 are all still £35 plus.

yh they were only on sale for 2 days

WWE 12 was only 24.99 on saturday

20 quid then went up to 35

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The story continues, then, as today GAME’s shares rapidly drop back towards the 1.2p mark after opening a little higher. The news that there are reportedly two parties interested in the chain suggests that share price may rise a little more shortly, though.

The Financial Times, via MCV, claims that OpCapita, the company that famously picked up Comet for £2, are interested in the UK side of the group, with Hilco favouring the overseas divisions, whilst Rothschild are the people behind trying to find a buyer for the business.

In related news, posts are now appearing online from GAME and GameStation staff, with clear signs that things haven’t been rosy for a while.

“They had little or no grasp of emergent market trends and utterly failed to find any sort of balance in-store in regards to marketing their pre-orders (which took up far too much of the space they were meant to be selling actual product in), pre-owned (took far too much new-release space and wasn’t priced sensibly) and finally, back-catalogue (which suffered because of the first two and almost utterly killed of the PC side of things completely),” says one such report.

We’ll keep you up to date with any developments over the day.

only chance they have if they are bought by a company with a good web development team. Otherwise amazon and play will continue to eat them up. High street is dead

yeah it pretty much is mate half the shops in my highstreet struggle to make any profit and alot are in debt we lost our biggest to that and thats HMVand if this goes our 2nd biggest will go