Financially, it’s a rout for Micromania-Zing, which plans to close the doors of many stores this year.
It’s no secret that the video game market is particularly tough for the Micromania brand, which is well known to French gamers. Indeed, the brand has not hidden its complicated financial situation for a few years, until the merger with the pop culture merchandise brand Zing in 2017. Since then, the video game store has been called Micromania-Zing and is still struggling to establish itself on the market.
According to gamekult, which had access to internal and confidential documents, the company should resort to a radical solution to get out of the mess. Of its 399 stores, the brand should soon close nearly 47, resulting in the outright dismissal of more than 130 group employees. If you thought the physical games industry was in trouble, the situation seems to be worse than expected.
The document also reveals that in France, around 62% of video game sales take place digitally, with dematerialized editions. An observation that does not help the situation of Micromania. In addition, the start of the pandemic further weakened the company’s economy, which had to close its stores for many consecutive weeks, which simply created chain reactions.
Micromania in bad shape for two years
First of all, this led to a catastrophic management of stocks and pre-orders, in the middle of the launch period for the PS5 and the Xbox Series X/S. In addition, and more recently, the brand was singled out by the departmental directorate for the protection of the populations of the Alpes-Maritimes for misleading commercial practices, in connection with the extended warranty offered by the stores.
It has therefore been several weeks since the site displayed a garish yellow banner, on which is written that Micromania must stop:
- present confusing information on the rights of consumers with regard to the legal guarantee of conformity and the commercial guarantee
- falsely presenting a guarantee called “warranty extension” as a commercial guarantee offered and sold by “Micromania”, when it turns out to be an insurance product managed by an insurance broker
- restrict the rights of consumers by imposing, within the framework of the terms and content of the legal guarantee, obligations not provided for in the legal texts, or by making the validity of the contract relating to the “extended guarantee” subject to activation on the site within 15 days of the purchase of it in store
It remains to be seen now whether these allegations, concerning the closure of nearly a quarter of Micromania stores, are true and if so, how the brand will get out of this bad situation.
