GameStop Offers Female-Focused Magazines with Fitness Games

Are you one of the nearly 700,000 people who bought a copy of Wii Fit in November? Or perhaps you’re one of the countless still trying to find it on store shelves after a sold out holiday season? If you fit into either of these camps, you just might be one of the “busy moms who often don’t have time to spare for exercise” that GameStop is targeting with their latest promotion (via a report from Kotaku).

In a press release boasting over 40 “fitness-oriented titles” on sale right now, GameStop announced that they will be offering free year-long subscriptions to Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, Redbook, Good Housekeeping, O Magazine, and other magazines for any consumer spending over $34.99 on those titles. Although they did not provide a full list of games included in the deal, obvious titles like Wii Fit and My Fitness Coach were matched with “brain fitness” titles such as Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day and My Japanese Coach.

GameStop senior vice president of marketing Mike Hogan provided this curious comment:

“We know that getting in shape is one of the toughest New Year’s resolutions to stick with, especially for busy moms who often don’t have time to spare for exercise. Today’s moms are looking for ways to incorporate exercise into their lifestyle. Active video games are a terrific way to reach your fitness goals, and as an added bonus, they can be enjoyed with your whole family.”

From my end, it seems like GameStop is making some pretty big leaps in assuming that a very specific audience — busy moms who want to get into shape — is the primary group buying a growing genre of games. Stuffing “mental fitness” games into that category just makes the whole deal even more suspect. After all, I’m willing to bet that there are more otaku nerds buying My Japanese Coach than family-focused mothers, but maybe that makes me just as jaded as the marketers who devised this campaign.

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