Kotaku reports that the GameStop subreddit has seen several complaints this week from employees dealing with system issues ranging from inventory searches getting messed up to pre-order histories being completely erased before shipments arrive. A few employees told the publication that the fiasco stems from a SAP software conversion that started earlier this summer. While it was meant to merge multiple sales and logistics databases and presumably streamline GameStop’s back-end workflow, it has instead created new problems for GameStop’s employees.
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This has led to stores not having enough copies of certain games and collector’s items for people who’ve already put money down on pre-orders, resulting in upset customers and a few instances of pre-orders being canceled at GameStop. Adding to the frustration is that, according to one employee, they can only refund canceled pre-orders with store credit after a month, regardless of whether a customer paid money or not.
Games that employees say have been affected by this pre-order fiasco include NBA 2K23, one of the year’s biggest sports games, as well as JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: The Cowabunga Collection. Things have been especially hard-hitting for more niche games like Made in Abyss: Binary Star Falling Into Darkness and The Legend of Heroes: Trails from Zero, since it’s common for stores to only receive copies of those games specifically for customers who pre-ordered them.
This is understandably annoying for customers who aren’t getting what they paid for, especially if they don’t have easy access to digital games or other game-friendly retailers. But it’s potentially very worrying for the employees involved who have no control over the situation. As one explained, since pre-orders are a key factor behind a store’s sales goals, canceled orders can land them with negative scores. “People are actually getting in trouble over this,” they said.
What makes all of this worse is the timing, as the next couple of months are going to be packed with major game releases. Gotham Knights, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, Bayonetta 3, Sonic Frontiers, God of War Ragnarok, and Pokemon Scarlet and Violet are just a few of the heavily-anticipated games that can be pre-ordered right now, and that’s not even getting into the rest of highly-anticipated games arriving in the coming year.
The full extent of the problem isn’t clear as of this writing, and it’s not immediately clear what potential solutions are being pursued. For now, some GameStop employees are having to handle cancelations by offering to re-order games and sending them directly to customers’ homes. Hopefully, that should work well enough to keep them from getting into trouble until GameStop is able to get its back-end problems sorted out.
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Source: Kotaku
