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Originally Posted by Echodork
Major releases are usually street dated... my Gamestop had several hundred copies of Halo 2 sitting in the back room as early as the 6th. However, game stores face major... and I mean major penalties for selling games before the street date. $100k per copy might be excessive, but a game store that sells street dated product early might be banned from carrying that publisher's releases in the future. Best Buy had some trouble with street dates a few years back, and an EB in Kentucky sold Halo 2 early and is in deep shit right now.
Every single copy of Halo 2 comes with a label that says "Do not sell before 11/9/04" along the top. It's that serious.
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I work at a GameStop, and he's right - it's a serious business. For some reason most people can't grasp that the video game industry is a serious industry. Car companies probably wouldn't be happy if a 2006 model vehicle hit the streets a month before its unveiling.
At our store, GTA: SA went on sale at exactly 7:00pm. Any copies sold before then and our store would recieve a $50,000 per copy fine. We actually had Half-Life 2 in sometime last week, and it said "DO NOT SELL BEFORE 11/16/2004"