A Reddit user who works in an Amazon warehouse posted a photo of a yellow tote packed with sealed PlayStation games. According to the post, staff were told to send around 450 different discs away to be destroyed. Most of them, roughly 80 percent, were music albums. The rest were games, and the photo shows plenty of recognisable ones: Goat Simulator, Kingdom Come: Deliverance II, Alan Wake 2 and a stack of Five Nights at Freddy's.
The worker said nobody explained why. "They didn't say why we send them to destroy but felt so bad for it," they wrote. The post passed 19,000 upvotes and 2,400 comments, which tells you how many people felt the same.
"Put them on sale for 10 bucks"
The most upvoted reply was simple: if there is excess stock, discount it. Plenty of people agreed, and some suggested holding the games for a Black Friday flash sale instead of throwing them away.
Others pushed back with the likely reason it does not happen. One reply argued that deep discounts "would damage the brand image," so retailers would rather dispose of stock than reset what customers expect to pay. Another commenter said this is not unique to Amazon at all, and that large retailers routinely destroy unsold goods of every kind rather than cut prices.
Why can't staff just take them?
A lot of people asked why the games could not be given to employees if they are being destroyed anyway. The original poster said they are never allowed to take damaged or destroy-pending stock. Another commenter guessed exactly how that would end: fired for stealing company property, even though the items were headed for the bin.
A former GameStop employee added a memory from around 2003, when unsold used SNES and N64 games were destroyed as the store cut back on older formats. The same thing, just a different decade.
The Alan Wake 2 irony
Several people spotted Alan Wake 2 in the bin. One commenter pointed out why that stings: the game launched digital only, and a physical edition only came later because fans kept asking for it. Seeing those hard-won copies heading for destruction felt, as another reply put it, "depressing as a gamer."
What this means for physical collectors
Nobody in the thread knew why these specific discs were chosen, and we do not either. It could be overstock, returns or a contract decision. But the reaction shows something clear: people still value physical copies, and they hate seeing them wasted.
That is part of why GameShelfClub exists. Games that are not wanted in one place are usually wanted somewhere else. Matching collectors who want to trade, and tracking prices so you know when a game is genuinely cheap, keeps more discs on shelves and out of the shredder.