Why BG&E failed - written by an UbiSoft PR employee

[Rococo]

It's sad that such 'evergreen' sellers are pretty rare. (Not counting bargain bin sales, obviously.)

Isn't that at least partly cause of the screwed-up way game retail works these days? The way I understand it, publishers essentially rent shelf space at retailers, rather than retailers buying X number of units outright. They have no incentive to keep old titles on the shelves when they could be using the space to push the latest flashy polygon-o-rama.

[Marek]

I believe a retailer orders a certain number of copies and the ones that don't get sold get sent back to the publisher for a sort of refund. At least that's how a Dutch game publisher explained it to me, and sadly I can't remember the exact details. (Does anyone know?)

But yeah the retail system is pretty fucked. There's limited shelf space, so a game has to prove itself in the first few weeks or it gets kicked out.

[elmuerte]

Online retailers don't have that problem. To bad most of them don't feature a nice way to browse their catalog.

[miffy495]

Or keep things in stock for a decent amount of time. Often I can find something on a store shelf months after Amazon and others have determined it to be a lost cause.