GameStop, world’s largest video game and entertainment software retailer, has recently announced that it will stop selling Microsoft Zune due to lack of demand.
It will continue to sell units that are currently in store and once that stock dries up, they have no plans to sell it further.
This is bad news for Microsoft as GameStop has over 5,400 stores worldwide, with around 600 new ones scheduled to be opened this year.
Zune once touted as “iPod killer”, will see further decline in sales as it is already doing not very well with only 4% of market share while rival iPod has 71% market share.
Dumping by such a big retailer will have negative impact on consumers.
Adam Sohn, Microsoft’s director of marketing for the Zune on this announcement said:
We have a set of great retail partnerships that give Zune a strong presence at retail including Best Buy, Target, Wal-Mart, and others. We will continue to invest in deep retail partnerships, and have seen good momentum online and at retail over the last few months including a great response to our recent spring update.
2 responses so far
1 figment ~ May 26, 2008 at 2:47 pm
I don’t see why this is such a big shock. No one goes to GameStop to buy an MP3 player anyway. That’s what Best Buy and other’s are for. This might be news if they were stocking iPods at GameStop, or something, but really just goes more into the business model for GameStop. They’re not a retail outlet, they’re a pawn shop for video games.
2 Kiyani ~ May 26, 2008 at 11:21 pm
You may be right but the psychological impact of this is huge because GameStop is a big retailer and it sends wrong signal to users.
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