In Stav’s blog post, she talks about how shops such as EB Games, Gamestop and other game retailers will begin to lose sales and become obsolete. (An example we talked about in our lecture is Blockbuster and how DVD rentals have become obsolete and replaced by services such as NetFlix). I agree with Stav’s view point on how stores such as these will become obsolete, however the time in which it will become obsolete could be longer then she thinks.

Game retailers such as these in my opinion fall under the section of just entering the maturity stage of a product/service life cycle. Even though we can see the correlation between the digital and physical demands of products in other industries,(Eg. Digital Books and Steam) Gamestop and EB Games are actively trying to regain their customer base. Apart from the points Stav have touched upon, Gamestop has also started to work with game developers in order to attain game items which can only be obtained by purchasing at certain physical retail stores. This allows the business to have a point of difference compared to purchasing digital copies of the game which allows for them to regain a competitive advantage in the market. A key factor which will lead to stores such as Gamestop to becoming obsolete is the rate in which storage technology develops. This is because with the current storage technology, gamers will only be able to download a handful of games before they are at max capacity on their storage systems(1 game is roughly 20-50GB, an average console only has 500GB-1TB worth of space),  this limits the online purchases they can make. In order for Gamestop to face the same demise as Blockbusters, the techonlogy industry would have to develop storage systems with a very large capacity. (Eg. 100TB Systems) This combats the limit of not having enough storage, my predictions is that when this new storage technology is introduced into the market, then stores such as Gamestop will have to find a unique competitive edge in order to stay in business.