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Thursday, April 21, 2016

GameStop's Publishing Business — GameTrust!

By LUDWIG VON KOOPA - Do they have MY trust?

When exclusively selling Shulk amiibo is not giving GameStop enough of a profit margin to satisfy their shareholders, they start creating positions like “vice president of internal development and diversification.” (That belongs to Mark Stanley, by the way.) They also get into the game publishing business. Meet GameTrust, featuring the same CamelCase stylising as its parent.

The first game they're going to publish is Song of the Deep, developed by Insomniac Games.

Song of the Deep Insomniac Games publisher GameStop GameTrust website key features
“Publisher: GameStop”? NO, IT'S GameTrust! Get it right! Sheesh, they got a lot to learn. (Source: Insomniac's site.)

GameTrust at least has a pretty cool logo. Better than GameStop's.

GameTrust logo GameStop G T
Source: GameStop.

At first sight it looks like some funky Japanese character or something. ...And then you realise it's just a G (Game) and T (Trust) put together. Still cooler than GameStop's.

GameTrust looks to be publishing indie titles made with tens of millions of dollars of budgeting. And they want to make a ton of merchandise from them.

GameStop insists that GameTrust's publishing will not compete with their traditional relationships with major existing publishers, suggesting they are more of gap games in-between those larger AAA releases. And may have different audiences. Apparently, they want to use Netflix as an analogy with how Netflix now publishes its own content.

No word if they waited patiently for already-existing game publishing company Gametrust (note lack of CamelCase) to disappear off the planet and off the ICANN registry.

Gametrust MobyGames entry High Seas: The Family Fortune Hurricane Airfire
I'm not sure if this is the company they wanna hang out with. (Source: Mobygames)

I'm wondering if their name is supposed to come from having, like, honourable legal contracts with the developers, or something.

Meanwhile, Random Tower brought up a good point about conflicts of interests between shit-list source Game Informer and GameTrust's games. Game Informer will no doubt be covering GameTrust's published games. Will their reviewers disclose the conflict of interest? Will they choose not to review these games? What'll happen? Game Informer's reviews show up on ratings aggregation websites, after all, and those can matter.

It'd be like if KoopaTV wrote reviews of our own games. (And if other outlets ever wrote reviews of our games, too, and if we were an accredited game-reviewing site.) We don't do that. We just write glowingly about them and have them win Best PC Game of their respective year two-thirds of the time. But at least you know we have a conflict of interest because it's all you ever hear about.

I doubt Game Informer has journalistic integrity, since I haven't seen any of that from them throughout their history. Whatever.

Song of the Deep comes out this summer. It'll be fun to figure out what GameStop stores will be looking like to promote that game come July. Maybe it'll be underwater and you need to explore the store in a submarine. ...Nah.


Ludwig should go to GameStop sometime and remember to bring a GameStop gift card he got as a birthday present sometime in 2012 or before. He wonders if it expired by now, but hopes it hasn't.


GameTrust published a few games in 2016 and 2017 and then stopped.

20 comments :

  1. why don't you take a break from KoopaTV for about 2 years?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. What does that have to do with the article?

      Delete
    2. Absolutely nothing.
      Uhm...
      Gamestop sucks!

      Delete
    3. Oh.
      Where do you get your games from?

      Delete
    4. ....Gamestop...
      That's literally the only place.
      I feel so trashy.

      Delete
    5. I have to deal with the pretty girls with no intelligence.

      Delete
    6. Are they why you dislike GameStop?

      “Hey Charssie, want a PowerUp Rewards Card...~? *wink*”

      Delete
    7. They are part of the reason.
      They get hired because they have tits and they can't even spell Gamestop.

      Delete
    8. I don't think they get hired because they can't spell GameStop.

      Delete
    9. Right, they get hired for their tits.

      Delete
    10. Alternatively, not enough girls apply to fill up ALL the positions, so the guys get the leftovers?

      Delete
    11. Yeah, the girls run the register while the males clean. What a great time to live.

      Delete
  2. You know how many times I resisted going for cute preorder bonuses from Gamestop, just so I can avoid shopping from them? Good thing there is an independent store nearby me as well as Nintendo NY.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ...Nope, I have no idea how many. :o

      The best pre-order bonus I even remember from them was a Dialga stylus for Pokémon Diamond. I didn't actually get it but it was cool.

      Delete

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