Retail Is Dead. Long Live the Playground.

There is a strange assumption built into most ecommerce websites: that the customer has arrived because they are ready to shop. Look at the architecture. Search bar at the top. Categories underneath. Rows of thumbnails. Filters down the side. Click a product. Read some specifications. Add to cart. Check out.

It is an extraordinarily efficient system when you already know what you want.

It is also a remarkably limited idea of what shopping can be.

On October 20 Best Buy began testing something more interesting. Best Buy Gamers, currently in beta, pulls gaming news, IGN reviews and videos, trailers, polls, sweepstakes, store events, preorders, deals and personalized gamer profiles into one destination inside BestBuy.com and the Best Buy app. In November the experiment is scheduled to become physical too with a dedicated gaming area at a Best Buy store in Torrance California where people can play games, get advice and attend events with IGN.

At first glance this looks like a retailer building a nicer gaming section.That undersells it.

Best Buy is testing a different answer to one of ecommerce’s biggest problems: How do you become useful before somebody is ready to buy?

Most retailers are remarkably good at servicing intent they did not create. A customer sees a trailer somewhere else. Watches a creator somewhere else. Reads a discussion somewhere else. Checks a review somewhere else. Talks to friends somewhere else. Gets excited somewhere else. Then, eventually, types the product name into Google, Amazon or a retailer’s search box. The retailer receives the customer at almost the final moment. By then the interesting work had already happened. The customer already knows the game. They may already know the edition they want. They know roughly what it costs. They may have compared retailers. The remaining competition is frequently reduced to price, availability, delivery time and loyalty rewards.

That is not a particularly comfortable place from which to differentiate.

Best Buy Gamers suggests another possibility: the retailer can participate in the enthusiasm that creates demand, not merely process the order that results from it.

That idea is especially relevant in gaming

Games are not consumed like replacement printer cartridges. People follow announcements months before release. They debate trailers. They watch previews and livestreams. They compare hardware. They follow esports teams. They build PCs. They discuss graphics settings, controllers and monitors. They collect merchandise. They argue about reviews. They show one another their setups.

In other words the shopping journey is surrounded by culture.

And culture gives a retailer something a conventional product grid does not: a reason for people to return when there is nothing they need to buy today.

That is the real prize.

Deloitte’s 2026 Digital Media Trends survey offers a useful picture of how fractured discovery has become. Among U.S. consumers identified as fans 52% said social media was their primary way of discovering new entertainment such as games, music, movies and events. Among Gen Z fans that figure was 73%. Fifty-seven percent of Gen Z fans said they commonly discover entertainment on social media and then go elsewhere to consume or purchase it. Meanwhile 49% of Gen Z and millennial fans said they wished they could aggregate content surrounding their fandoms in one place.

That gap between discovery and transaction is where Best Buy is planting a flag.

Imagine two ecommerce experiences.

The first gives you 473 gaming products in neat rows. You can sort by price, rating, brand and availability. The second knows you play on a Nintendo Switch 2 and PC. It shows you what is launching this month. There is a review worth reading, a trailer you have not seen, a poll about the game everyone is discussing, a nearby launch event, a monitor that matches the kind of PC games you play and a preorder button for a title you have been following.

Both stores can sell you something.

Only one feels like it understands why you came.

That distinction becomes increasingly important as assortment explodes. Best Buy launched its third-party Marketplace in August 2025 and said the change more than doubled the number of products available through its digital properties - the largest expansion of its assortment to that point.

More choice sounds unquestionably good until you think about what choice does to navigation

Once every retailer can stock almost everything assortment stops being the entire competitive advantage. The difficult problem becomes helping a person decide what is worth paying attention to.

A product grid answers: “What do we sell?”

A destination answers: “What is happening here?”

That is a much more powerful question.

It also explains why the IGN partnership matters. Best Buy does not need to manufacture an editorial reputation from scratch. IGN brings reviews, features, videos and gaming news into the destination while Best Buy brings commerce, stores, inventory, memberships and events. Their partnership extends outside Best Buy as well through an “Out This Month” series, IGN social coverage of Best Buy events, a holiday gift guide and shoppable livestreaming. IGN says the reviews and scores appearing on Best Buy Gamers continue to be produced independently by its editorial team.

That last detail is essential.

The opportunity in content commerce is enormous, but so is the temptation to ruin it.

People visit stores to buy things. They visit media because they hope to learn something. Once those experiences merge the boundaries must become clearer, not blurrier. The moment every positive review appears suspiciously aligned with an advertising package, the destination loses the trust that made it useful.

Best Buy appears to understand another important part of the equation: a destination cannot live entirely on a screen. Its Torrance pilot will allow people to play games and participate in events. The company is also reviving the communal energy of game launches including late-night openings tied to the November 5 release of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

There is something almost counterintuitive about that in 2026. Ecommerce spent decades teaching retailers to remove reasons to visit a store. Make the transaction faster. Make delivery easier. Eliminate the trip.

Those improvements were necessary.

But once convenience becomes universal inconvenience is no longer the only thing stores have to solve.

They also need to solve indifference

Why walk into this particular building when the same product can arrive at your door? Why open this retailer’s app when a search engine can show you prices from ten competitors?

“Because it is convenient” remains a good answer.

“Because something interesting is happening there” may be an even better one.

McKinsey uses the term “destination shopping” for experiential formats built to provide consumers with a reason to go somewhere and notes that such environments can strengthen brands and drive omnichannel activity although they are more capital intensive than conventional formats.

Gaming is almost laboratory-perfect for testing that idea because digital and physical experiences can reinforce one another.

• Read the review online;
• See that the game is playable at the store;
• Go with a friend;
• Try it;
• Test a different controller;
• Ask somebody about a monitor;
• Attend the launch;
• Post about the experience;
• Come back online for the next release;
• Preorder.

That is not a funnel. It is a loop. And loops are more interesting than funnels because they are designed around return behavior rather than a single conversion. This is also where the phrase “community-driven commerce” needs a little skepticism.

At launch Best Buy Gamers is not really a community platform yet. It has personalized profiles, polls, events and sweepstakes but the announced feature set does not include substantial member-to-member conversation, user-created posts following other gamers or community groups. That makes the beta a destination with community ingredients, not yet a community in the fullest sense.

And that may be the most interesting place for Best Buy to go next

Imagine that your gaming profile was not simply a personalization questionnaire but a useful identity. It could show your platforms, games and setup. You might share a PC build, follow people with similar hardware, save another member’s setup, join a local event group, compare recommendations from people who actually own the equipment or see what Best Buy specialists suggest for a particular game.

The store stops being a database maintained exclusively by the merchant. Customers begin making it more valuable for one another.

Research on social commerce suggests why that distinction matters. A 2025 systematic review of 123 studies found that social interaction, interactivity, trust, personalization, information quality and enjoyable experiences are among the recurring factors associated with customer engagement in social-commerce environments.

But the lesson for retailers is not “add a comment section.” Community cannot be bolted onto a catalog as decoration. People need a reason to contribute. Identity. Expertise. Recognition. Shared interests. Access. Status. Belonging. The sense that somebody on the other side of the screen is worth talking to. Done badly - a retailer-created community becomes an abandoned forum sitting awkwardly beneath a promotional banner.

Done well - it changes the economics of the site.

A conventional ecommerce page must continually reacquire attention. The user leaves after buying, and the retailer spends money persuading them to come back. A genuine destination can produce its own return reasons.

• There is a new review;
• A launch is approaching;
• Someone responded to your setup;
• An event was announced nearby;
• Your favorite franchise has news;
• A product you follow is available to demo;
• A creator you trust is live;
• Your group is discussing an upgrade.

The transaction still matters. But it becomes one episode in a relationship rather than the entire relationship. That shift would fit neatly with Best Buy’s wider strategy. Its leadership has explicitly said the company is developing not only as a retailer but also as a media, advertising and technology business. Best Buy Ads and its Marketplace are already contributing to the economics of the company and Adweek reports that Best Buy Ads will sell placements inside the new gaming destination.

Seen from that angle Best Buy Gamers has several possible jobs at once.

It can sell products. It can deepen membership. It can create advertising inventory. It can learn what authenticated customers are interested in through the preferences they voluntarily add to profiles. It can drive store visits. It can give hardware brands a setting for experiences rather than another rectangular banner ad. It can turn product launches into events.

Most importantly, it can increase the amount of time between “I am interested in gaming” and “I need to buy something” during which Best Buy has a meaningful relationship with the customer.

That does not mean product pages are obsolete. Quite the opposite.

When the gamer finally decides they want a particular graphics card at 9:47 p.m. they do not want an immersive journey through the soul of gaming. They want the price, specifications, compatibility, inventory, delivery date and checkout button.

PwC’s 2025 customer-experience research found that 69% of consumers say price comparison significantly influences their decision to engage with a brand. Convenience has not stopped mattering just because experience matters too.

The mistake is treating those two needs as mutually exclusive

Ecommerce has spent years optimizing the bottom of the journey - the moment when intent is already high. Better recommendations. Faster pages. Cleaner checkout. Better search. One-click payment.

The next opportunity may be farther up the journey, where intent is still being created. That is what makes Best Buy’s experiment larger than gaming.

Imagine the same architecture applied to photography: tutorials, creator portfolios, photo walks, camera comparisons, workshops and gear.

Or home theater: room tours, streaming recommendations, installation guides, demos and enthusiast discussions.

Or smart homes: project galleries, compatibility advice, automations shared by customers and local installation events.

Or computing: PC builds, benchmarks, creator workflows, upgrade advice and live workshops.

The common principle is not “publish more content”. It is organize commerce around what people are trying to become better at, enjoy or belong to. Traditional online stores assume products are the destination. The more interesting retailers will realize that products may simply be things people encounter inside a destination worth visiting.

Best Buy Gamers is only a beta. It launched on October 20 and there are not yet published results showing that the model increases customer retention, conversion or lifetime value. It could evolve into a genuine enthusiast platform. It could also end up as an attractive promotional landing page that people visit mainly when a reward or major launch gives them a reason.

That difference will determine whether the experiment matters. The test is simple. Six months or a year from now will gamers open Best Buy Gamers because Best Buy emailed them a coupon? Or will they open it because they genuinely want to see what is happening?

If Best Buy can achieve the second outcome it will have done something more valuable than improve ecommerce conversion. It will have converted a store into a place.

And in an internet overflowing with products a place people choose to return to may be the most valuable product a retailer can build.