Major Retailer GAME Canceling ‘Fallout 4’ Pip-Boy Edition Pre-Orders

GAME, the UK’s dominant electronic entertainment retailer, is canceling customer presales of the Fallout 4: Pip-Boy Edition.

This morning, GAME has denied customers their previously reserved copies of the £99 special edition of Fallout 4. The news was delivered via a mass e-mail claiming that the order could not be processed due to problems with the transaction.

This is where things start to get a little bit suspicious.

The instances in which the “bank has come back” and “not allowed the payment to go through” seem to be wholly restricted to the limited edition of the game. Additionally, the sheer number of people receiving these notices suggests not a problem with the bank, but within GAME itself. The chance that numerous banks made an identical mistake at the same time for countless account holders in response to a simple transaction with a major retailer is very slim, to put it mildly.

In addition, many of the orders have been placed for months already, with no notification of any issue. Consumers are reporting receiving the e-mail even when no information has changed in regards to their banking and with other purchases from GAME going through without complication.

I’m not the only one looking at this sideways; social media is flooded with GAME customers coming to the same, very obvious conclusion. At the very least, it represents a sore breach of trust between the retailer and their dwindling faithful.

The toxicity of presales to the gaming industry at large has become obvious, by way of consistent publisher abuse of consumer trust. Maybe it’s time to stop letting them fish through our wallets in advance, and evaluate whether they’ve actually earned our money before we hand it over.

Nate Church is @Get2Church on Twitter, and he can’t become a wildly overhyped internet celebrity without your help. Follow, then retweet and favorite everything he says. It’s the Right Thing To Do™!