Just in case you didn't see this yesterday, HMV will be opening a new gaming zone in its Edinburgh store this Friday. The area is set to feature 27 Xbox 360s, big Samsung HD screens and the capacity to run multiplayer gaming for up to 16 participants. Access will apparently be controlled through a membership scheme with customers paying five pounds for three hours of play or three quid for 60 minutes. Regular competitions are planned, based around the likes of Guitar Hero 3, Project Gotham 4 and Halo 3. If the concept is successful, HMV plans to roll out gaming zones across its other large stores. (More here.)
I was quite interested in this idea until I discovered the business model. A fiver?! A fiver for playing disrupted Halo sessions against confused shoppers and feral teenagers who've been there for five days on a diet of Red Bull and tartrazine? It's Laser Quest all over again.
Does HMV charge customers to use its listening posts? No, because they're a nicely complicit form of advertising. Of course, the overheads are greater with a dedicated gaming-zone - apparently, it's 2000 square feet which is a considerable slab of retail space. But is a competitive, monified environment really the best way to encourage consumers to try and buy new games? I'm just not sure what demographic HMV has in mind here.
A while ago I posted about how game stores need to re-think how they treat customers. The gaming population is growing up - the average age of a UK gamer is now 28 (source: BBC UK Games Research) - and games retail isn't growing with them. I'm not sure how many 28-year-olds will want to pay for three hours of gaming - what they might want to do is spend ten free minutes with a couple of games they were thinking of buying.
What do you think? Have I got this all wrong? Perhaps the gaming zone is all about tempting youngsters out of social networking sites and back into records shops. Perhaps it's not really about gaming, it's about creating a community within the confines of a music retail space. Perhaps I don't understand it, because it's not for me.
