Games Inbox: Are you sad to see the end of GAME stores?

The Tuesday letters page is surprised by just how well the Switch 2 is doing in the UK, as one reader wishes there were more remakes like Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined.

Games Inbox is a collection of our readers’ letters, comments, and opinions. To join in with the discussions yourself email [email protected]

GAME over
So that’s it for GAME, I guess. I don’t think I’ve ever set foot in a Sports Direct or House Of Fraser (I’m not even sure I’ve seen one of those) so GAME is not going to exist for me now. I certainly haven’t used the website in years and I imagine it’s going to be a swift descent for that, since nobody’s going to think of trying it now that high street shops aren’t acting as free marketing.

I’m not surprised the whole toy and board game pivot didn’t work but then what else could they do? Physical sales are practically a novelty nowadays, at least for PlayStation 5 and Xbox, so all you’re going to get are very casual gamers who want to buy boxed copies, and they aren’t going to want to go in a shop as off-putting as GAME.

It’s sad to see but also inevitable. My commiserations to anyone that loses a job over this, but it seems like they were running on a skeleton crew already anyway.
Blop

Chart success
It’s been a while since I’ve seen any retail charts, so it was a bit of shock to see how much Nintendo is dominating in the UK. I realise that the digital percentage for Switch is much lower than the other two consoles but even so, it helps put into perspective all the worries about slowing sales and disappointing game line-ups.

People have pointed it out before, and been ignored, but Nintendo knows what it’s doing and the games that are out now are exactly what the public wants. Maybe not Hyrule Warriors and Kirby Air Riders in the UK, but those games are popular in Japan, and they obviously wanted to get some kind of Zelda representation in the first year.

Are the priorities what I would personally have wanted to see? No. Do I think their handling of Animal Crossing is bizarre? Yes. Nintendo don’t always get things right, as we well know, but I don’t think the Switch 2 deserves the kind of doom and gloom I’ve seen it get in some quarters. Is it a mild disappointment? Maybe. Is it any kind of failure? Absolutely not.
Taylor Moon

Same as it ever was
There’s been a lot of speculation about Nintendo Directs and State of Play recently but I haven’t heard a thing about the Steam Machine from Valve this year. All that talk of Half-Life 3 and being a rival to PlayStation 5 seems to have gone very quiet almost instantly.

Is this to do with the cost of components now or have they fallen behind with Half-Life 3? Kids today, who don’t even realise Valve used to make games, won’t know but back in the day Valve were notorious for delays and you couldn’t trust them to keep to any date. I guess that hasn’t changed at least.
Gadfly

GC: They haven’t said anything about anything this year. Their plans may well have been impacted by rising RAM costs.

Why so serious
I know there’s a new movie coming out by Zach Cregger (the guy behind Weapons, I can’t believe he agreed to do it!) but this little three minute movie is by far the best Resident Evil live action I’ve ever seen. It stars Maika Monroe from It Follows and it’s really well done, with lots of references to the games but a serious tone and really sad story.

It’s great but I ask you GC, as you seem to have played quite a bit of it now, is it anything like Resident Evil Requiem in terms of atmosphere? You were talking a lot about it being funny but there’s definitely no jokes in this short movie.
Lentil

GC: Everything we’ve played of the game, including the scary bits, has been pure shlock. And we mean that as the greatest compliment we could pay a Resident Evil game. The short film is good but tonally it doesn’t match anything we’ve seen from Requiem.

Oh, it sings to me
With people waiting for a new game annoucement from FromSoftware and something about Bloodborne are we really going to be satisfied with just a remake at this point? The game still looks great and now the loading’s sorted automatically with the PlayStation 5 there’s not a lot that seems essential. I’d still welcome it, but it’s going to seem like small beans after over a decade of waiting.

For me it has to be a sequel or all this silence has had no meaning. They keep saying it’s a really important game to them but the only way to prove that now is with an actual new game. I’d settle for a spiritual successor – you could rename Elden Ring to Dark Souls 4 and it wouldn’t make any difference – but we must have something soon or it’ll be like the Great Ones won.
Metatron

Newly retro
Well, isn’t this interesting? Here we are in February of 2026 and a lot more consoles have now joined the retro gaming library, along with thousands more games.

It was in 2005 the Xbox 360 launched, which is now easily a retro console, and the PlayStation 3 can be considered a retro console now. PlayStation 4 and Xbox One are getting on now in age and I’d say by the 2030s they will join the retro gaming library as well. Retro gaming grows and gets better with age and I myself am a retro gamer.

Mega Drive, PlayStation 2, and Xbox 360 are among my favourite consoles of all time. I did enjoy reading Ransome’s Reader’s Feature on retro gaming being the future of gaming and recommend everyone gives it a read. I will admit my favourite Saturn games are Athlete Kings, Sega Rally, NiGHTS Into Dreams, and Daytona USA.

There are easily tens of thousands and thousands of retro games out there and thats the biggest library of games for anyone. We are even seeing remasters of Broken Sword 1 and 2 and some retro games are getting or have had reboots.

It proves that no matter what the year or generation retro gaming is always here to stay and gets more and more impressive and popular as each console generation passes.
gaz be rotten (gamertag)

Reimagine that
I really wish I liked Dragon Quest now, after seeing the Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined remake. Unfortunately, I have tried one before and hated it, but I love what they did with this one visually. There’s so many SNES era games I’d love to see get this treatment.

From Mario to Metroid, to Chrono Trigger and Castlevania, this looks to me to be the perfect way to update old 16-bit and PS1 games and still make them look and play like they used to. It’s a shame Nintendo doesn’t really go for that sort of remake, but they did do Super Mario RPG, which is kind of in the same area, I guess. Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined looks much better, it’s just a shame it’s for a game I don’t like.
The Bishop

People care
I would say that I completely disagree with the Reader’s Feature over the weekend, about developers destroying themselves, the industry imploding, and no-one caring.

Certainly, the industry is changing, with performance topping out and triple-A games taking longer to make and becoming prohibitively expensive. That’s not necessarily all bad, but it needs addressing and a lot of the industry shifts flagged as being signs of the end times are abortive attempts at coming to terms with those changes (live service for example).

There have been other attempts, though: episodic gaming, subscriptions, free games, backwards compatibility, VR, going multiplatform, increasing the cost of games, decreasing the cost of games, the rise of double-A, etc. It’s clear that the industry is looking for a way forward, and we can help guide it by pushing back against its bad attempts (NFTs) or endorsing its good ones (buying Clair Obscur: Expedition 33).

It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing just the bad or the good. While the truth probably lies somewhere in between, when you’ve read prophesies of the death of the gaming industry every week for the last five-plus years, they become increasingly hard to take seriously.
Matt (he_who_runs_away – PSN ID)

Inbox also-rans
I love that The 8-Bit Big Band has won two Grammys now! I hope they come back for a proper UK tour, I missed the one in London last year.
Bosser

Have any of these indie comic book games ever worked out? I’ve never heard of I Hate This Place but it reminded me of the last Hellboy game, which was also a disaster.
Cronogate

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