This is appalling. For years GameStop (and before the merger, EB) threatened to drop product if publishers went online with digital distribution - I should know, I worked at a lot of those publishers.

Now, in order to punish the people who have gone online - PC publishers - they've radically diminished the store space available to PC games and have gone crazy over console stuff.

However, as a publisher, I'm sick of having to pay anywhere from 2 - 5% of my entire projected revenue to GameStop so I can participate in their usurious POP programs to launch a game succesfully:
-Pay 10K to have store managers mumble into the phone "thankyouforcallinggamestopwouldyouliketopreorderdecapitator3000forps3foronlyfivedollars (deep breath) thisisTravishowcanihelpyou"
-Pay to have a poster hung in the window next to a competing game or have a standee placed in the front of the store behind another poster, or have the standee placed on an "endcap" that faces the rear of the store, behind the used UMD movies...
-Pay to have the little change pad at the counter with your logo on it
-Pay to have your game in the flyer
-Pay to have your game listed on the website as a "featured title"
-Pay to have your logo on the shirt the store manager might wear that week.

Seriously, at one publisher we paid out the NOSE to have aggressive GameStop POP merchandising. When we followed up, we had only 50% compliance. We threw HALF our money down the drain because Travis couldn't be bothered to stop checking in used games to actually put together the stuff we paid for.

So, sure, if their business model is going to get stronger by having suburban housesows hold up the line asking for the "Nintendo HD with the thing" while hardcore gamers fume in line only to be told "Uh, Crysis, uh, that's not out yet," then sure, that's fine.

We'll download away.
Wait until hardware guys (and it could even happen in this generation) publish a major release completely online, and Travis is stuck sitting on 300 used copies of Darkwing Duck for GBA...

Sure, they say, GameStop will still be needed to sell the hardware. Right, because nobody else sells hardware, except Wal-Mart, Best Buy, Target, Circuit City, Amazon, NewEgg, Dell, and none of those have any brand strength with suburban housesows, who actually prefer the sweatsock redolence of the strip-mall Gamestop over the place they can also buy shoes for the kids and Redken conditioner...