Video games suppliers were already doing business in the internet without video games distributors during the early years of the video game business in the internet. During those early years there were only two players in the video games business: the video games suppliers and the video games retailers. The video games retailers were only those who had website stores and sold video games to online clients supplied to them by suppliers.



Originally, suppliers of these video games were usually the marketing department of the company that made the video games. As the competition for the production of new video games and its marketing heated, affiliated companies involved in the manufacture of video games began to realize that they can save more if they just concentrate in video games production and let other middlemen do the marketing for them. A perfect example of leverage and delegation for sure!

This concept gave birth to the wholesale distributorship of video games. Soon, wholesale video games distributors were already the ones supplying the video games need of both the online and offline retail outlets.

With this set up, wholesale distributors will purchase from the video games suppliers or maker of the video games the finished products and will be the ones to distribute them to their respective retailer outlets at wholesale prices. Depending on their arrangement with suppliers, the cost of marketing tools like stickers, leaflets, posters and even TV and print media ads will either be shouldered by supplier or wholesale distributor.

Some knockout differences between the two and things you should know about how they conduct their business most of the time. In Terms of Ownership: Suppliers are usually the sales department of a firm engaged in the production or bulk distribution for some companies for video games.

Originally, they were supposed to be tasked the marketing and distribution of their products, but to save on cost, they are now mainly the servicing department for privately owned wholesale distributors who would purchase their products in bulk orders and distribute them to online and offline retailers at wholesale prices. Thus, suppliers are owned by the manufacturer of goods while distributors are privately owned firms that buy goods in bulk from the supplier.

In Terms of Function: In most cases, video games distributors have exclusive contracts with suppliers that would make distributors the only firm to market the video game products of their company. As such, suppliers will have only to sell direct to the wholesale distributors.

On the other hand, wholesale distributors will be the one who will function to market the products they bought from the suppliers. Their distribution of the video game products will include both online and offline retail.

In terms of effort, it is the wholesaler distributor who is tasked with the burden in making sure that the video games will be popular with players. But in terms of profit, he also has the most to gain because of the volume of transaction that he handles among the video game retailers that he supplies.

In a sense, video game distributors have the freedom to be retailers as an additional option to maximize profitability while video game suppliers would be more than happy seeing their products well marketed by video game distributors. So what is better for you may be the next question you may ask perhaps?