Numerology – 0.5 pence

On Monday, March 12th The Game Group plc announced they were still in discussion with their suppliers and lenders about their terms of trade that would allow the business to continue to operate. At one point on that day, if you were trading on the London Stock Exchange, you could have purchased an individual share in the company for half a penny. In fact 85,301,340 shares did change hands on that day, the highest number of Game Group shares traded in a single day so far this year.

Most readers’ relationship with the group will be through their local Game store(s) and online purchases however I wanted to take this opportunity to extend that. As of January last year, the group owned Game, Gamestation and Gameplay as well as the game.co.uk, gameplay.co.uk and gamestation.co.uk online stores. At that time they owned 639 stores in the UK and Ireland but less widely reported are the additional 674 stores overseas, 197 of which were in France.

In the second half of last year, they had over ten thousand employees and to scale that number in my head, I remembered the size of the University I attended and realised every single student, lecturer and member of cleaning staff could all have been moonlighting for The Game Group and we would still have been short.

When the news was released that The Game Group had gone into administration, I posted a single tweet solely containing the #ripgame hash tag. Whilst The Game Group’s situation has produced staunch supporters and detractors, the fact that 277 stores have been closed by the administrators PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) and consequently pushed a fifth of the workforce towards unemployment is simply despairing.

I accept that being able to “do a Starbucks” and in some towns be able to step outside a Game store to see the next without taking a step is riding the gaming expansion wave too high. However what I’ll miss is the potential to be able to do that. I have no doubt that now that part of the business has been bought out of administration, primarily because closing the 277 stores made it a much more attractive investment opportunity, the outcome will mean less high street and more online.

I’m pleased that The Game Group were recognised as a sound investment by OpCapita and that they didn’t end up closing up shop for good. Not just because of the jobs that were saved but also because there has been so much recent rhetoric about supporting your local independent game store. The fact is, whether big or small, if you’re costing more money than you’re earning for an extended length of time, indie or not, the same humourless wordplay news headlines await.

Whilst you cannot currently buy or sell shares in The Game Group, if you’d bought a tenner’s worth of shares on New Year’s Day, they’d currently be worth £3.18. Ironically enough that’s still allegedly over three times the amount that the company OpCapita set up to handle the purchase paid for the 333 stores they’ve been sold. I know Game’s management fought hard to try and turn the business around but eventually ran out of time; I take solace from the fact that the people taking over the UK business arm buy retail businesses and turn them around for a living so whilst I’m unsure what the long-term future holds for high street gaming, it’s certainly not dead yet.