Retail Sales Policy
We believe retail game stores are crucial. They’re places for community, safety, camaraderie, and commerce.
We grew up in game stores. We want them to be viable businesses where gamers can see what’s new, learn to play, make new friends, and get great answers to all of their puzzling questions.
This retail sales policy outlines a mutually bountiful relationship between our business as a game publisher and your business as a friendly local game store. We want to work together to serve gamers where they live and play games.
Our Retail Philosophy
Our guiding philosophy is mutual benefit. (That’s it! That’s our whole philosophy!)
Here are the four main ways we express that philosophy to retail partners:
Open Lines of Communication: We communicate regularly with you about our plans. We include concrete details like serious street dates for new releases and selling points tailored to our titles’ specific audiences. We listen to your feedback and do pretty much any reasonable thing to help you sell our games. We incorporate your ideas into our future plans, if they make sense.
Flexible Pricing: We neither print suggested retail prices on our games nor suggest retail prices in the first place. Every store that sells our games should set the price that’s right for them.
Net Pricing at Competitive and Sustainable Levels: Each of the games we offer under our retail purchasing terms is net priced; you can review our pricing at any time. You’ll find most of our net prices to be roughly 50% of the prices we usually charge when we sell those games to gamers ourselves.
Publish Games with Value: Our business is built around publishing games that gamers are excited to pay a fair price for. We have sales from time to time, just like you do. But our model is not about deep discounts any more than yours should be.
Opening a Retail Purchasing Account
We welcome game stores with brick-and-mortar storefronts, or who sell games at conventions, to apply for retail purchasing accounts with us. The application process starts with the form linked below, and might include a follow-up meeting by phone or videoconference.
Apply for a Retail Purchasing Account ↗️
We reserve the sole authority to determine to whom we extend retail purchasing accounts. We decide based on criteria of our choosing, which we reserve the right to change at any time.
We do not offer retail purchasing accounts to online-only businesses. We give a skeptical side-eye to “online-mostly” businesses who operate a dusty public selling-closet in front and a high-volume webstore in back.
Retail Purchasing Account Terms
If a retail purchasing account has been extended to you, by placing an order under those terms, you agree to abide by our terms of resale.
Terms of Resale
- You agree that you’ll offer our games for sale to people who’ll play them, not to resellers.
- You agree to meet our minimum order threshold and pay our Net Prices, plus shipping charge, at the time of your order.
- You agree not to advertise our games below their Minimum Advertised Prices (“MAP”), which we publish for each game along with its Net Price.
- You agree that sometimes we must provide a lower quantity than you ordered, either because we must allocate an item in high demand, or because we are concerned about putting you in an overstock position that might force you to discount our games and hurt their perceived value.
- If you choose to offer our games for sale in new condition on Amazon, eBay, Target.com, or Walmart.com, you agree that your offerings there will be part of a mixed physical and digital sales presence that supports the long-term health of both.
- You agree that before you offer any substantial quantity of our games for sale below MAP — whether in person or online — you’ll reach out to us. If you’re overstocked, or just can’t move something, we’d rather have a conversation about buying it back with credit toward future orders than see it unloaded at deep discounts.