carnival73: Yeah, I'm not sure what happened with that 15% coupon - Did it cost those who had it quite a bit?
I never knew that it existed until I heard the stink about it.
Well, there's the thing. It was meant to only be for active IGN Prime subs, but IGN included it in their trial and people were able to get it ultimately for free. No one ever deactivated it in that case. But then right on Black Friday, GG decided to pull the plug. Emailing only some people about it and deactivating it early for some active subs (such as mine, which is now canceled as I only ever used it for the GG discount).
GG claim their contract with IGN expired. IGN claim they didn't know what was happening.
I've explained in several long emails to people at GG why I won't be buying from them now and what they can do to earn my custom back. To put that in context, I have made enough purchases/drive enough affiliate sales to GG to earn their highest level almost 10 times over. So that's a lot of business they're now losing from me.
I have to wonder if their decision to remove that discount now (which, yes, they ultimately had to pay for) is going to cost them more than paying said difference! After all, half the profit from one discounted sale is still better than no profit from a lost sale -- and that's gotta add up fast.
So right now, I feel they need to offer some sort of loyalty benefit to make up for the fact that they cannot/are not willing to compete competitively with the other services price wise.
carnival73: As for region locking - Gamestop and Gamefly are horrendously bad over here. I usually don't bother to even look at those two sites no matter what deals are rumored to be there.
That's how a I feel with GMG now. I keep hearing of these 30%/35% off vouchers but what use are they when the games I want to use them on are not being sold to me? May as well wait for a Steam sale and buy directly.
On the other hand, GameFly actually offer a few more titles here than D2D did. But I still won't buy from them after they way killed my legal copy of SWAT4. If they can do that with SWAT4, they can do it with any game they sell.
I feel the same with console gaming too. We're paying about the same as you I think. There's only be a few games I've been prepared to buy first hand at release here, Yakuza 5 being one of them ($108 USD) but that number I can count on one hand.
At least handhelds are a bit cheaper as my children mainly play games on those.