Is EB Games now secretly parallel importing games itself?

Whos the biggest hypocrite of the week then?

If people in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones, as the old saying goes, it looks although EB Games should be scolded for hurling boulders. Australian EB Games stores are selling UK imports of the latest multi-platform Transformers games this week. The games are clearly the UK versions with the Australian Classification Rating stickers placed over the top of PEGI ratings. EB importing UK games is nothing new: they have done it with US copies before (here). However that situation was a little bit different. We’ve been told the Transformers games are arriving freshly shrink wrapped, and despite that, these games are also labelled as ’preowned. Activision, who publishes Transformers, doesn’t place stickers on UK copies of their games. Instead they reprint the covers with the Australian rating. Vooks has a review copy of the Australian version of Transformers for Wii, providing evidence that, as usual, this is the case.

However, the plot thickens. We have phoned several EB stores and been told that the games have been discontinued in the system and that they won’t be getting them in. Other stores have multiple copies of the game on various platforms. The Transformers games aren’t always crash-hot, but we doubt that they have so many preowned copies of the game so soon, especially on multiple platforms. This is a brand new release title, thus EB have gone around the publisher and stocked the games themselves. They are doing what Gametraders has been doing for months, and what they did with Ocarina of Time.

There’s nothing illegal with this activity: nothing wrong at all. However, we do find it kind of ironic that EB Games have decided to stock parallel imports and sell them as preowned. What are they being so sneaky for?

Vooks has contacted Activision for comment. EB has not replied to any of our correspondence to date.