GAME: We will be the last man standing in physical video games

gamesindustry.biz:

I felt a degree of sympathy for Nick Arran when I heard he was leading the GAME business.

Arran is a veteran of video games retail, with stints at HMV, Blockbuster, Amazon, Sainsbury's and ShopTo, amongst others. So it was no surprise that he was called up to succeed the company's former CEO Martyn Gibbs.

But the situation Arran was facing was one of intense uncertainty. When he took charge in July 2020, the world was in the early stages of what was a crippling pandemic. GAME's shops were closed, its online store was tasked with carrying the weight of the business, and its customers were increasingly choosing to download games.

So when I asked Arran how it's all been, I was pleasantly surprised to find it hasn't all been a baptism of fire.

"I've worked in games for 25 years, and this is the most change I've ever seen in such a short space of time," he tells us.

"You can see from market data that online is 75% of the market. Before the pandemic, it was 45%."

"To be at the front of that has been exciting. We are creating a business for the future, right? I'm sure a lot of people when the pandemic kicked off were like: 'That's the end of GAME. To be honest, without Frasers Group [the retail conglomerate that acquired GAME in 2019], that probably would have been the case. But they have invested in us, given us what we need – mainly cash – to be able to run a successful business.

"We've had three pretty solid years. The pandemic was a challenge with our stores being closed, but our website was definitely making up for that business. And then the new consoles came out. Obviously, we had a great year then. The following year was strong as well with consoles still being on allocation, and us having really good allocation.