GameStop to allow game returns for full store credit within two days of release

GameStop’s latest promotion is a doozy: The gaming retail giant will offer returns within two days of a game’s release in the form of store credit worth the full price of the game, even for opened software.

Known as Guaranteed to Love It, the initiative was first reported by Cheap Ass Gamer on Twitter with an image of a company memo outlining the transaction process. A GameStop representative confirmed the details of the program to Polygon.

“True to our core promise, today’s announcement is a testament that GameStop is committed to giving power to the players — and our ‘Guaranteed to Love It’ trade promotion offers our customers the peace and mind of buying video games inside our retail stores at no risk, beginning with Days Gone next week,” the company said in a statement to Polygon.

The open-world zombie action game from Sony’s Bend Studio will be the first and only game to be eligible for the Guaranteed to Love It program; it does not apply to anything else as of now. And the deal is valid only for the standard edition of the game through Sunday, April 28 — two days after Days Gone’s April 26 release date — at GameStop retail locations throughout the U.S. In other words, you can’t buy the game at any time and still take advantage of the promotion.

Yes, the deal theoretically allows customers to buy Days Gone at launch, play through it in less than 48 hours, and then return it for $59.99 of GameStop credit. (Sales tax is not part of the refund.) But that may be more trouble than it’s worth, considering the game’s reported length of approximately 30 hours.

Either way, it’s a smart and potentially necessary experiment on GameStop’s part. Earlier this month, the company reported a net loss of $673 million for the 2018 fiscal year, which ended Feb. 2 and included the sale of the company’s Spring Mobile division in January for $700 million. At the time, the company announced that it was implementing a “cost savings and profit improvement initiative” that would include “supply chain efficiencies, operational improvements, expense savings and pricing and promotion optimization.”

The new Guaranteed to Love It deal seems like something that falls under that plan, and GameStop happened to announce it one day after the company’s new CEO, George Sherman, started in the role.