How much? No, really, please tell me

As I've mentioned before, supermarkets have taken to giving new release games super discounts in the first week of sale, often bringing the sale price below their cost price. As major (read: hyped) releases sell an enormous amount of copies in that first week (Modern Warfare 2 sold more than one MILLION copies in the UK on its first day alone), supermarkets can drastically increase their customer footfall by doing this. The 'losses' on the games are recouped by the profits on the other puchases made by gamers when in store and everyone's happy.

Except the specialist game retailers.

Left 4 Dead 2 is out this Friday, 20 November (as is Assassin's Creed II). I've pre-ordered through Game and popped in yesterday to see what the retail price will be but the sales assistant said that he didn't know yet. Last weekend, Gamestation told me that they would not know the instore sale price until the afternoon of Thursday 19th but that it would be between £38-£50 (thanks guys).

I don't know if this is standard practice, though I do remember knowing the Fable II price, for which I had similarly pre-ordered, well before release. I think that it may be the case that specialist retailers are being more cagey. If a new game is going to be what I will term 'price bombed' by a supermarket, it doesn't matter what the specialist retailer sells it at, as they can never price match. They could, in fact, add another £5 on their normal new release price (say £45 instead of £40), for as long as supermarkets are price bombing, with little effect on their sales. I think Left 4 Dead 2 (and probably Assassin's Creed II) is too much of a niche title to rouse the supermarkets to this type of behaviour but you can understand the specialist retailers' circumspection.

The market is clearly not working here but I'm not sure how it can be resolved - supermarkets will try to make money, gamers will try to save it and specialist retailers will be left in the middle. A download-only future would end this but, in that event, all of those parties will lose out.