Yesterday the trusty Sarcastic Gamer Bargain Hunter turned up the Morrisons half-price game sale in the UK (which is still running until Sunday). To run that sale past you again, all PS3 and 360 games are going for half-price at £25, Wii games are being sold for better-than-half-price at £15 and DS games are also better than half price at £12 a pop. As a result, from what I’ve heard from a fair few people (not me, I’m too poor at the moment), Morrisons stores across the UK are running out of games and fast.

However, other retailers are feeling the crunch and having to better the supermarket, at the expense of profit. Hit the jump for an analyst’s view on why this price war could get ugly.

In an interview with The Guardian newspaper (picked up by EDGE) an analyst from European banking group Altium Securities noted that many games shops run “price promise” schemes, which essentially offer to better the price of other stores if you show them some sort of proof. GAME shops run this scheme, as do other electronics stores such as Currys and PC World.

For gamers looking for an even better bargain than what they’re offered at Morrisons, this is great news. You can stroll into GAME and say “here, I saw Mercenaries 2 for 25 quid in a supermarket” and they’ll have no choice but to offer a better price to you as it’s part of their price promise scheme. Inevitably this means that other stores will eventually start their own sales, forcing them to cut their prices and lose out on profit.

The chances are Morrisons are making a huge amount of money from this current sale (regardless of cut-price situation or not, as their usual game sales probably aren’t much to brag about) and so the current offers wont be the last that we’ll see. Both Morrisons and other retailers will relaunch sales such as this one in the run-up to Christmas to attract more punters and sell more games. However, with cut-price offers running, the profits for shops such as GAME (who are used to selling stacks and stacks of games anyway regardless of sales) will be reduced greatly while those for stores such as Morrisons will grow, since their profits from games and other electronic entertainment will be miniscule in comparison to specialist shops.

Still, one could argue that a miniscule profit is better than nothing, as to keep games at full price when other stores are slashing prices here and there is practically economical suicide. Cut-price sales are better than no sales at all, and this toing-and-froing between stores, price promises and the various offers that will inevitably spawn from the Morrisons stunt will cause an outright price war with each possibly reducing more and more to score points on the others. The analyst remarked:

“Our expectation is that little help will come from hardware sales, as Microsoft has just reduced the entry price of the Xbox 360 to US$199 (£115), with Sony likely to follow suit. We think the above combination is likely to result in a reining in of profit estimates closer to Christmas.”

Couldn’t have really put it any better – stores will make less, but it’s better than making no money at all if gamers flock elsewhere to get the latest releases for less.

Of course, the less the stores are charging, the more gamers can keep for themselves to buy more games later. In the midst of this potential price war, gamers win outright because they’re getting the games on the cheap and as a result might even be tempted to buy two games when they’re out rather than just the one if it’ll cost them no more than a single game would in usual economical conditions.

It might be a bloody price war on the horizon, but we wont be the casualties. For once, it’s a good time to be a gamer in the UK.

Morrisons Games Offer May Spark “Bloody” Price War – EDGE

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