The Challenge Of Buying Games At Physical Stores
The remake of Paper Mario: Thousand Year Door released a couple of weeks ago—the same Paper Mario that’s on my Top 25 Best Games of All Time list. Naturally, I didn’t have to think twice to consider buying it, and naturally, as a person who prefers holding the real deal to an eShop release, I wanted to bike to a store as a welcome break from work.
Yet that gradually becomes more and more challenging: brick and mortar stores offering video games are disappearing. In my earlier post Overlooked Reasons To Still Buy Physical Media, I wrote:
Physical games can be more difficult to get […] the added hassle of biking to a brick & mortar store, hoping it’ll be in stock […] I prefer first sweating and then clenching something in hand to return home. That also means, to a lesser extend, that buying physical media can still be considered a somewhat social event.
Something I didn’t consider while writing those arguments was the availability of the store itself, not just the game that may or may not be in stock. In our neighbourhood in the last years, I’ve seen specialized video game store chains close up shop, toy store departments vanish, and even general electronics stores move or disappear.
