I buy the occasional video game, and like many areas there are now online and retail stores to buy from. You can buy physical DVD's from specialist game stores such as EB or generalist stores that have a game section lie The Warehouse or JB Hi-Fi. You can buy DVD's online through websites such as HDWow or Mighty Ape, or you can download them through sites like Steam or Origin. For consoles, you still mostly have to buy the physical disk.
Providing you've got the bandwidth, Steam seems to be the cheapest source of games although you only get to use them on your account and you can't ever transfer them to someone else. Buying physical media online also seems to be the cheapest way to go, you can often save significantly on walking into your local store and generally the games arrive within a couple of days.
So at the expensive end of the market oddly are the specialist retail stores, perhaps they don't have buying power or cost a lot to run. I notice my local EB Games runs sales about every other week, their usually very high prices are reduced to what I would say remains relatively high prices. Occasionally you might see a bargain on an old game, but overall EB Games stays at the high end of the market even when they have a sale on.
These stores rely I think on reselling games a number of times. In a sense they charge the full retail price as a sort of rental, once you are sock of the game you bring it back for a trade in. EB Games then buys it back from you at a heavily reduced price and then sell it again to someone else at a margin. Often this makes the secondhand game cost more than other outlets regular price. I've seen new games in the Warehouse far cheaper than the same game second-hand at EB Games.
I've often wondered how any EB Games store survives, they never seem that busy but perhaps they have a very loyal following of customers. I once returned a new disk that was damaged and they were really reluctant to replace it, it was one of those situations where they accuse you of damaging the disk even though you never got to play the game. I'll continue to look for a bargain there from time to time, but high rices and poor service aren't a winning combination for me. .
