Almost two months ago, I went over GameStop’s Q1 earnings report. (link) It wasn’t good news, and their stock price had dropped by $3, roughly 35%, as a result. I’ve been loosely following the ongoing… situation… since then. Now that I’m posting again I’m going to run through some of the stuff that’s come up real quick so the topic will be “caught up.”
I vaguely remember them announcing a stock buyback program and apparently so many people signed up that they hit the cap and some people aren’t going to get what they expected. It ended a couple of weeks ago and the stock price has dropped another $1 and some change since, to around $4.11. Right around that time they announced a partnership with R/GA to “help reimagine the in-store experience.”
Among the things they’ve tossed around are the idea of in-store esports competitions, and purely retro-gaming oriented stores. I honestly don’t know if I’ve ever been inside a GameStop that had room for any manner of in-store competition, but I guess that’s the point of thinking outside the box, as it were.
The good news for GameStop is that the sales figures I quoted last time seem to be industry-wide. That is, hardware sales are down for the entire industry, not just GameStop, and they’re down roughly the same percentage. That suggests that GameStop isn’t entirely at fault. On the other hand, it reflects poorly on the industry as a whole, though I imagine there will be a large surge for the next console cycle.
It’s going to be a rough ride on the way there though. The first time I talked about GameStop was back in January when their stock price was close to $15 instead of $4. That means it’s dropped about $11 in six months, down roughly 70%.
They’ll more than likely be around for a good while yet, including the next console release. I would normally like to point out that businesses this size don’t tend to keel over quickly. They haven’t exactly rolled out mass store closings and/or layoffs yet, so it’s bad, but they aren’t exactly at death’s door. At least, they don’t appear to be.
I wouldn’t mind seeing one of their retro-focused stores myself. That might convince me to actually visit one of their stores again, so maybe they’re onto something.
Y’all take care, I’m sure you’ll hear about this again in a month or so when their Q2 earnings become available.
Unidentified Signal Source 
Well, if you look at Blizzard for an example, how many of their titles have gone to digital downloads. If the majority of the industry has adopted a digital sales model, chains like GameStop are surely going to bear the brunt with loses in sales.
Here’s an interesting thought. Someone I play WoW with is limited in how much data they can use a month without paying extra. This last big patch cost them $95 because a relative with high speed unlimited was unavailable for them to take their pc over to do the download. How much money do you think GameStop might earn if they made available a WiFi connection in the store for say $20. Or even $10. If you download a lot of games, it could’ve a huge savings to a customer.
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That’s actually a pretty good point, especially if they did it for console downloads as well. Buy a digital copy and download it in-store at higher speed and/or lower cost than you can get at home.
Sure, the logistics of packing up a PC or console for transport would probably put some people off, but it would certainly provide an additional advantage to their physical locations.
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If they offered peripherals like monitors, keyboards, controllers as part of the fee. Power cords already set up just being in your pc or laptop, or your console. We are not liable for damage if you hook it up wrong, yada yada legal disclaimer.
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