Originally published at: GameStop turns a profit for the first time in 2 years | Boing Boing
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It’s a glorified pawn shop that specializes in gaming and nerd culture, which on paper isn’t necessarily bad but every time I’m there i just see junk i would never buy and the people working there are very indifferent. I don’t know what they could do to make the business more appealing
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I just bought two Switch OLED’s yesterday and teh sticker shock makes me think there should be a profit in there somewhere for them.
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The retailer credited its economic rebound to the cost-cutting measures it implemented throughout the last year, including three rounds of layoffs, and increased sales of collectibles (apparel, figurines, toys, etc.).
I’m not sure layoffs and Funko Pops is a sustainable strategy.
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Any company with non-zero revenue can fake a profit for a few quarters with enough layoffs and store closures. Their whole business model remains doomed as game sales all move online through the hardware vendors. If they were gonna pivot to collectibles or other things, they needed to do it fifteen years ago when the future of streaming games was already evident. Instead they milked the cash cow of used games and did nothing. They deserve to die.
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Based on employee horror stories going back some years, I’m constantly surprised GameStop still exists…
Seems like the retail cut of game sales used to be higher than it is now - I’m wondering if, in the last 15 years, publishers and distributors have been clawing back some of that for themselves, and if used game sales became a justification. Or maybe that’s not true, and their business woes are entirely because download sales have fatally eroded their total sales.
Well, the Funko Pops part of it is solid… oh, wait…
I imagine the collectible market is a lot smaller (and even more so 15 years ago)… so they avoided the profit loss of shifting to a more niche business so they could see the whole business model get eaten away, instead. Foresight!
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The best incarnation of a Gamestop-like place i can think of would be a comic/gaming store. With a good mix of video game related stuff with table top RPGs and board games sprinkled in. Locally here there are a couple of places that are somewhat along those lines, they’re mom & pop type shops that really care and try to build up the scene. Gamestop is just a blood sucking vampire that wants to extract as much money from people without much regard for them or the employees. Good riddance
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Do they even still publish that print games magazine? But they were also the subject of that contrarian options thing a while back, right? Is that wound down or are they doing fine trading on the fumes of cash on hand?
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It’s pretty much a given in the age of abdication of trust enforcement that unbridled verticals result in the profits going upstream past retailers. Typically, there’s a big hole at the level where the Private Equity is applied that sucks money out of customers, retailers (if they’re allowed to exist), suppliers and anyone else.
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I remember when my local “game stores” sold both table top games and computer (PC) games… but it was at a point where there wasn’t a lot of inventory to be had for either part of the business. (Comics were another matter, with their high inventory turn-over probably making them a very different, incompatible sort of business).
I wonder how much the changed markets for each has moved them closer together - or further apart. A comic book shop back then could have also sold table top games (and I heard about some that did), but these days there’s just so products in tabletop games that you’d need to have in inventory to make it worthwhile - and it turns over a lot faster than it used to. (I think a lot of comic shops started including collectible card games when they became hot, as they could focus on the more popular items without taking up a lot of rack space.) The big “hobby” shops that used to have craft goods, models and tabletop games now seem to have pretty reduced inventories - they let online stores take over the low-profit margin and high turn-over product part of their business (except for the most basic craft stuff).
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Quite a few comic shops around here have a decent TTRPG and general board game section 
can’t say i’ve seen any video game + board game stores but i can imagine that’s a thing in other places, would certainly be cool
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