Gamers everywhere are lamenting the cancellation of one of the better discount programs out there, Best Buy’s Gamers Club Unlocked, or GCU as it’s more commonly known as. Destructoid posted this article and went through the footwork of verifying the news in two independent retail locations. You cannot add GCU membership to your cart or renew. This applies to both the free and paid tiers. Benefits will continue until membership expires, at which point you cannot re-up. Discounted prices will now show up upon checkout, and not be displayed anywhere else.
I used to not pay any attention to GCU since I had Prime. The Amazon Prime discount wasn’t bad and at it’s… prime… offered some nice discounts: 20% off video game and toys-to-life pre-orders and new releases up to two weeks after release day and release day delivery. Amazon has slowly stripped off some of these benefits so that now the 20% only applies to pre-orders on new standard edition games. If any word preceded “edition” in the game version that wasn’t “standard”, you’d end up paying full price.
I found out about the changes in policy late last year when I bought Horizon Zero Dawn: Complete Edition. No discount was applied because it wasn’t considered a “standard edition”. Stupid I know. That was when I seriously considered Best Buy’s GCU program. I signed up earlier this year in February so I’m still good until 2/2020. 20% discount on all video games old and new and it includes toys-to-life as well. Hell, it even discounted Nintendo Labo. It was a great program and I’m sad to see it go.
There’s no word yet if Best Buy will be replacing the program with something else, if at all. And assuming Prime hasn’t completely eliminated all video game benefits by then, it’ll be the only game in town, pardon the pun. And the way it’s set up now, it is totally not worth getting for that program alone if you aren’t already a member. Unless of course you don’t mind used games and want to subject yourself to the lameness that is GameStop.
I’ll tell you this much. I’m going to be using the hell out of my membership until the last possible moment. R.I.P GCU.
