On the Subject of EB Games / Gamestop

Katherine McPhee

Fucking EB Games. For some reason a month or so ago I had a momentary lapse in rationality and pre-ordered GRID on ebgames.com. Having bought games on that site for several years now it has become something of an automatic response to the game-buying impulse. For a good while I had nothing but positive experiences, even though the bricks and mortar stores have long had a quite poor reputation, but in the last year or so the online alternative has really gone to shit. Three times now I've had orders get stuck in "verifying" hell when I've used exactly the same payment and address details that I've used successfully any number of times previously. In fact AoC was one of them. Now I go to check the GRID order status, two days after the game's release, expecting to see "shipped", only to find it still "verifying". And no word from customer service about what the problem is.
So I cancelled the order.
Actually, the reason I cancelled it was mostly because it turns out GRID is available on Steam. I should have thought of that before going to EB in the first place but there you go. The EB/Gamestop (as far as I can tell it's just two different skins on the same website) order was supposed to come with a T-shirt but fuck that, they had their chance and they blew it. Five minutes after cancelling the order, GRID is downloading on Steam with no hassle, no shitty disc-checks, and the promise of automatic updates.
Not to mention I couldn't even cancel the fucking EB order in Firefox because the cancellation window just stalled so I had to suffer the indignity of firing up IE, adding insult to injury.
Fuck you, EB/Gamestop, I look forward to your inevitable demise.