Misery loves company's Journal

Oh, GameStop.
In sum: The new PC game Deus Ex: Human Revolution comes with a coupon, worth $50, to download a copy of the same game from the new game streaming service OnLive. Except at GameStop, that is.

See, GameStop employees were instructed by corporate to open the packages, remove and discard the coupons, and re-seal them and sell them as new. They also apparently did not intend to tell their customers about this fact until many people took their games home and found no coupon. GameStop's higher-ups have admitted the truth of this and said it's because OnLive is a competitor, and they did not want to endorse the service without a formal partnership.

ETA:

cmdr_zoom pointed out that there is some unfunny in the comments of the second Kotaku link; I didn't look at the ones on that particular article myself, so please tread carefully.

TechCrunch blog post

Kotaku blog post #1

( Kotaku blog post #1 text )

GameStop has responded by ordering stores to pull their remaining copies of the game pending a recall, in cooperation with SquareEnix.

ETA 2: GameStop is now trying to make up for their flub by (Joystiq link) offering people who purchased DeusEx a $50 gift card and a coupon to buy two used games and get one free if they bring in their receipt and a copy of an e-mail sent to shafted customers.