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GameStop CEO Says Games Are "Irrelevant" To Company Revenue (insider-gaming.com)
submitted 2 months ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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[–] 35 points 2 months ago* (10 children)

They honestly could just become a merch store and only carry plushies, shirts, other nick-nacks and hardware. The one nearest me is already pretty much just an authorized dealer of FuncoPop garbage as is. I'd be more inclined to visit if they carried other general video game related stuff so I wouldn't have to wait for shipping.

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  • [–] 14 points 2 months ago (5 children)

    Do people go to gamestop specifically to buy merch, though? I always thought that that was intended like candy in the check-out aisle: you grab it because it catches your eye on the way out, after you've already collected whatever you actually came in for.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago (3 children)

    Might as well go all in on this. Merch and toy stores are popular for kids so i don't see why they won't do this. I don't know why Western companies are so afraid to branch out from their "core competencies" and fighting tooth and nail to keep the rotting corpse of their previous business models. Japanese companies have been branching out from their initial business models since forever. Nintendo used make card games but is now a videogame behemoth. Fujifilm went from photography to biotech. Sony recently eked out into finance. This branching out is why Japan has some of the oldest companies in the world because they value long term survival. GameStop could do the same by giving up on their old business model and embrace selling merch and toys instead.

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  • [–] 2 points 2 months ago (2 children)

    Do they have the same private equity system that we do in the States?

    I feel like it's been years, but wasn't GameStop sort of a victim that somehow survived? I may have that all wrong.

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  • [–] 1 point 2 months ago (1 child)

    Japan definitely has a different system but I'm not sure what the specifics are. But i can tell that Japanese companies have different philosophy than most companies across the world. They are not nearly as greedy as most companies and the fact that they are willing to pivot to a different field than they started with shows they are willing to spend the upfront hefty cost of switching to a new field, even if it cost profits in the next quarter; if this leads to survival in the next couple of years. I kinda like that because I loathe the short term-ism of most companies, especially Western ones.

    GameStop had been bought to keep it afloat. I think it was going to be sold for bankruptcy to make the new owners rich but i think Redditors coordinated to buy shares or something so that it won't go to bankruptcy or something like that. I could be wrong though.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    i think Redditors coordinated to buy shares or something so that it won’t go to bankruptcy or something like that. I could be wrong though.

    Close enough. DeepFuckingValue was either the one that caught on to or was the public face of a concern that noticed that GME was extremely short sold which roughly means that they sold shares they didn't own with the notion that the share price would drop. Then they could buy the shares needed to cover the ones they shorted and make money. Selling short can have theoretically infinite losses, btw. The internet noticed...

    So people flooded in and bought shares, call options, whatever, with the thought that the stock price would go up because the short sellers likely took out loans to cover shorting the shares, and the people that loaned them money don't find cases of infinite losses/risk nearly as funny as the old wallstreetbets.

    Some brokerages halted buying GME, and DeepFuckingValue got to testify in front of congress.

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  • [–] 7 points 2 months ago

    That's basically Hot Topic, Box Lunch and a bunch of other similar stores that sell nothing but licensed merch. Only instead of Harry Potter, Disney, and a handful of popular shows it's video game properties.

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  • [–] 3 points 2 months ago

    That was basically the case for most GameStops in Germany before they closed down for good nationally a couple years ago. You still had your games, of course, but like 80% of the customers we had came for merch. Funkos, shirts, other memorabilia.

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