Instead of a delay, the Coronavirus has created a very slight speedup for one game's release date. Rather than launch on the same day, GameStop is staggering the release of DOOM Eternal and Animal Crossing: New Horizons by releasing DOOM Eternal one day early, on March 19th. This is, according to the company, being done as part of CDC guidelines and social distancing practices to help prevent the spread of the Coronavirus to both customers and employees. For the Nintendo fans out there, Animal Crossing: New Horizons is still releasing on March 20th, so no early release for you...unless you've found other means of acquiring the game. Midnight launches for both games have been canceled, so make sure you're there during regular store hours, if you are getting the physical copy.

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[xdarkx]

Lol at the "safety precaution." GameStop is not an essential store that should be open at this moment... Heck, there are even news about how GameStop employees are properly equipped with hand sanitizers and whatnot. They have to buy them themselves.

 

[jt_1258]

Safety precaution my ass, fuck of with your excuses Gamestop. Ya just wanna break street date to get an edge on other stores.

 

[Tony_93]

Lol at the "safety precaution." GameStop is not an essential store that should be open at this moment... Heck, there are even news about how GameStop employees are properly equipped with hand sanitizers and whatnot. They have to buy them themselves.

Employees need their paychecks you know. If gamestop closes. Are you going to feed the employees' families, pay their rent and bills???? Is really easy to criticize the store but cashiers usually live paycheck to paycheck and would rather keep working than to stay at home without an income.

 

[simbin]

Animal Crossing fans RIP.

 

[xdarkx]

Employees need their paychecks you know. If gamestop closes. Are you going to feed the employees' families, pay their rent and bills???? Is really easy to criticize the store but cashiers usually live paycheck to paycheck and would rather keep working than to stay at home without an income.

Life or paycheck. Which would you prefer?

 

[Tony_93]

Life or paycheck. Which would you prefer?

The average death age from Covid19 is 81 years old. 80% of cases are people with mild flu like symptoms. But yeah, let's pretend we are all going to die...

 

[xdarkx]

The average death age from Covid19 is 81 years old. 80% of cases are people with mild flu like symptoms. But yeah, let's pretend we are all going to die...

I'm not sure if you understand the situation. The virus is very contiguous and could last from few hours to few days. Even if you do not get the virus, you may accidentally pass it off to someone close to you, and they in turn can pass it to someone else.

 

[Xzi]

Makes sense, can't have the Animal Crossing and DOOM Eternal crowds both filling the stores simultaneously. OTOH, as others have pointed out, Gamestop does not provide essential services or products. Seemingly the only reason they're staying open now is because the entire company is going to go under soon anyway lol.

 

[Ericzander]

They just wanted to kill the crossover memes. Bad taste.

I'm kidding, I have no horse in this race but as long as they have permission to do this I don't see why people are annoyed.

 

[Pipistrele]

Employees need their paychecks you know. If gamestop closes. Are you going to feed the employees' families, pay their rent and bills???? Is really easy to criticize the store but cashiers usually live paycheck to paycheck and would rather keep working than to stay at home without an income.

Gamestop could do as many workplaces already did and pay employees during quarantine. Even if that's out of the question - and it shouldn't be out of the question - providing some protection for both employees and customers (be it supplying stores with sanitizers or canceling launch events) is the very least Gamestop bigwigs could do, yet they fail even at that.

 

[godreborn]

not much of a problem for me. I'm still in the process of downloading all of my digital games to my animal crossing switch. that should take another several hours or a day. I'm only queuing 6 games at a time, and with animal crossing included, I have 100 games.

 

[chrisrlink]

the only thing i need physical is a new 2tb hdd for my ps4 (and i can do mail order for that and take a antibacterial wipe to get rid of surface germs) the rest is digital stuff

 

[The Real Jdbye]

Lol at the "safety precaution." GameStop is not an essential store that should be open at this moment... Heck, there are even news about how GameStop employees are properly equipped with hand sanitizers and whatnot. They have to buy them themselves.

GameStop is going bankrupt, if they closed down every GameStop for the 18 months that CDC speculates this will last, there might not be anything left of them. Not that that's necessarily such a bad thing for us, but it'd certainly be bad for the employees.

 

[xdarkx]

GameStop is going bankrupt, if they closed down every GameStop for the 18 months that CDC speculates this will last, there might not be anything left of them. Not that that's necessarily such a bad thing for us, but it'd certainly be bad for the employees.

Everyone that has been following GameStop news should know how well they are doing. The thing to keep in mind is that the government will most likely force most if not all non-essential stores to close at some point, and GameStop is no exception. It's just a matter of when that happens.

Also, GameStop have been laying off employees throughout the past years and are still losing money. If they are forced to close their stores, guess what, there may be more layoffs in order to keep afloat. So how would you help those unemployed then?

 

[deinonychus71]

All people criticizing Gamestop very harshly need to realize something...
This virus will kill people directly and indirectly. The economic impact is already massive and it will cause more casualties.
It's a sad world, but because there is no safety net in the US people still need to have money to well... survive the confinement and what comes next.

 

[Viri]

The only way I'd work there during an outbreak, is if I can wear a hazmat suit to work.

 

[CeeDee]

Nintendo wouldn't let them sell Animal Crossing early, eh?

I'd have to imagine they'll probably close once they get all those sweet AC/Doom sales in... I sure fucking hope.

 

[Tony_93]

Life or paycheck. Which would you prefer?

I'm not sure if you understand the situation. The virus is very contiguous and could last from few hours to few days. Even if you do not get the virus, you may accidentally pass it off to someone close to you, and they in turn can pass it to someone else.

Way to switch it up bro...

 

[xdarkx]

Way to switch it up bro...

It's clear you don't get my point. If you want to down play the situation, you can go do that in Twitter or Instagram then let us know how it goes. I'm not going to bother arguing with you on this.