1 is correct, but 2 is false. Reserves and subs are absolutely still pushed. If I were to theorize why your acquaintances think otherwise, it would be that they work in GameStops located in non-dense areas, or a low visitation rate. Either that or they are none the wiser and don't notice that they are seen as poor employees for not caring. Reservation % and GI subscriptions are essentially the pinnacle of the job. It's possible that SMs are not gut-bustingly hard on their employees to get them sometimes as well, but as someone before me stated, it does in-directly affect things in the form of being given more hours. I know this because I had to do that job, of distributing hours based on performance in order to ensure my store hit its weekly quota.



If reservation and sub numbers are not high, we get lectured on the weekly conference call, so we are essentially forced to cut hours from those who don't try, and feed hours to those who are demonstrating that they do if we are to ensure that doesn't happen. This is made more difficult than you might think, because we are actually given a limited number of hours to distribute. It is honestly soul-crushing sometimes to have to give an employee 10 hours in a given week simply because you have no choice. It makes us look like the bad guy, but ultimately is a trait of GameStop's still terrible policies in management.



It is absolutely true that GameStop uses placeholder dates. If you're new to the future release hype scene, you would know though that assumption of release dates based on GameStop's reservation calender are way too common, but the dates are simply not accurate until they are known to the general public because we are not privy to that information anymore than someone else. The reason we use placeholder dates is to convince people to make the reserve, because as stated before, reserving a "TBD" is not as enticing. There some standard dates commonly like Dec 31st but sometimes when the game is releasing earlier in a year, they tend to just make a well defined guess.



We sell the games, we don't develop them or work with those who do, nor do are we fed special, top-secret information by those developers.



It's simply that he was talking out of his ***. You think that he was not obligated to tell you so it piqued your curiosity, but that doesn't change anything. He doesn't know. There's no way he could know. His position doesn't entitle him to know. That's that.