The more new games an employee sells, the more used games they’ll have to sell to make up for it. In other words, according to salespeople speaking to Kotaku and elsewhere on the internet, GameStop is incentivizing employees to stop people from buying new games and hardware. GameStop staff say the company has threatened to fire people who don’t hit these quotas, which is leading to all sorts of scuzzy tactics.

“We are telling people we don’t have new systems in stock so we won’t take a $300 or $400 dollar hit on our pre-owned numbers,” one GameStop employee told me in an e-mail, requesting anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to press. “This is company wide and in discussions with my peers it is a common practice. We also tell customers we don’t have copies of new games in stock when they are on sale—for example, Watch Dogs 2 is currently $29.99 new and $54.99 pre-owned. We just tell them we don’t have the new one in stock and shuffle them out the door.”

My Nintendo Switch Pre-order might just be my last interaction with this franchise. And I just upped my Power Rewards to Pro status again for another year.

A second employee also said they found themselves in trouble after selling a bunch of new games last Tuesday, during the launch of Resident Evil 7, Kingdom Hearts 2.8, and Tales of Berseria. “Now I’m fucked for the week,” that employee said. “Now I have to sell way more pre-owned this week.”

When a company slogan is "Power to the Players," they are actually referring to metrics and corporate. What a sham!