Wal-Mart Cuts Game Prices Ahead Of Holidays

Wal-Mart is offering significant deals on video games for the holiday shopping season, aggressively cutting prices on popular titles and offering incentives on Wii consoles in hopes of luring gift shoppers. The major retail chain will reduce the prices of popular titles like The Beatles: Rock Band and Left 4 Dead 2 by $10, reports Reuters, and Wal-Mart will also offer a $50 store gift card to consumers who buy a Wii. The promotions will continue in the weeks leading up to Christmas, existing alongside Wal-Mart's existing pricing deals on toys, electronics and holiday food items. Its initiatives mean other leading retailers, like Target and Amazon, are responding with promotions of their own. Widespread and particularly aggressive retailer discounting, a response to periods of slower foot traffic on the part of cost-conscious consumers, has harmed many video game publishers this year -- most recently, Ubisoft said that its normally-thriving back catalog saw gross profits decline "sharply" because of price promotions on store shelves. Stern Agee analyst Arvin Bhatia calls Wal-Mart's move "a net negative for GameStop," but notes that the game retailer's used business should allow it to weather the competition better than big box retail chains. In the near term, Bhatia says, Wal-Mart's moves may not impact publishers, but the analyst wonders whether heavy discounts this holiday could pressure average sale prices for games in the coming year.