Does Gamestop have a future?

I just bought Lego Star Wars and Lego LotR from GameStop online on PS3 for my kids, because you can’t get Lego LotR anymore online. GameStop is saved!

Then they took two weeks longer to deliver despite me paying for expedited 2 day shipping, and I found a new copy of Lego LotR in a local game shop, cheaper. So I then returned my GameStop order. GameStop is domed!

If GameStop can’t execute an order properly, they are just utterly fucked.

I had walked into one to try to find this game after not being in a retail game stop for ten plus years. It is mind-blowing - a couple of sad walls of current console games with the entire center of the store filled with random crap. Why would any material amount of folks wander in to pick through a sparse game collection and random funko figures when you can get all of this online for cheaper?

Amazing the GameStop model has survived this long.

Well they survived on people turning in their used games for like 75 cents and then reselling those at five dollars less than the new one. It was not just crazy watching these exchanges but annoying to stand there in line while this was all explained while trying to buy the neat things they had in store that was basically ThinkGeek and board/card games stuff.

Meh people way over-exaggerate the resale value they gave. It’s great for zing points but it’s not true. Their buy back prices were no worse than Amazon and others that I encountered, but their prices were good enough that it made it actually reasonable to buy games near release back when I had more free time. I’d routinely buy newly released games used (yes only $5 off but what is that extra $5 giving me?), play it a bunch, then in 2-3 weeks resell it. That allowed me to play the game for $20 instead of $60 (and I didn’t have to wait for shipping it back to Amazon). Time it right with a buy 2 get 1 free pre-owned deal and it was a real economic way to play games.

And for someone like me who almost never re-plays games (once I put a game down I’m usually done) it was perfect.

I was doing this with my PS4 up until Humble Bundle started overloading me, and then Gamepass completely killed it off for me.

That was not a hypothetical situation. I stood there while they gave this kid 75 cents for the game and watched them put it on the shelf. This is a first hand accounting that including a 10 minute explanation about how many bonus points the kid would get but only if he did through their website and not in store, but they could use a tablet in store to do it right away to make it look like an online sale while the 2-3 of us behind them just stood there watching it all unfold wondering if we could ever just pay for our stuff and actually leave.

I can give you the address if you like. I think that store is still there.

The point is they survived on used game resales, and their rewards member schemes. For everyone else, buying from them generally just sucked. It is rarely quick.

That’s fine but from my experience buying and selling a good 30+ games over a two year period (enough that I paid for their elite membership because it made it more economical) I never encountered that, except for some really really old games or games that just were not popular at all (meaning they’d probably sit on the shelf for a long period of time).

I can find plenty of 5 year old last gen games right now on their website they will gladly give $15+ for.

Sure but everyone likes to try and make it seem like GAmestop was scamming people with this. It was a legitimate business model that convinced Best Buy and Amazon to attempt the same thing, but it’s a business model that won’t be sustainable much longer.

I was tempted to reach into my purse and hand the kid a full dollar for that game. 75 cents! I mean…

And that’s before you get to the part where they keep selling used games as new games but they don’t consider it used because some employee only played it for a week.

Gamestop had a specific model, and when the used games resales started drying up and they didn’t pivot to physical games and ThinkGeek stuff… I really don’t know what they thought was going to happen. It’s not pleasant going there to buy things. It’s full of long transactions of their reward members trying to squeeze out extra things from their memberships and slow as hell. They got a little more foot traffic by securing presale bonuses, but now no one seems to use them for that much anymore.

I assume the people who were members were members because they got something out of it… but selling back a game for less than a dollar to some kid… it doesn’t take a lot of imagination to know why that left a sour taste.

I was never much into console gaming but my kids were. Gamestop was the easy way to get some credit for games they’d never play again, and turn that around to buy a game or two they wanted to play. Plus, they did have some good deals on older used games.

Uh-huh. Let me see those thumbs

Reuters reported last week that Sherman has lost out on more than 587,000 shares in GameStop, originally granted in his April 2019 “inducement award agreement” and worth roughly $98 million at current prices, for failing to meet performance targets. Despite that, as noted by the Wall Street Journal, he will keep another roughly 1.12 million shares granted in the same agreement, currently worth in the neighborhood of $175 million. That value is a weird fluke, considering GameStop’s share price was well under $10 when Sherman became CEO. If the GameStop stock was worth that much today, Sherman’s shares would only be worth about $11 million.

He was barely scraping by no doubt on the meager $1.1 million a year he earned, the $150k sign on bonus back in 2019, and the 1.5x salary annual cash bonus.

It was a tough 2 years for him as CEO, there was Covids! And he no doubt did a lot of hard work from home, to be well deserving of that $180 million dollars in stock options.

He should buy everyone at wallstreetbets a free game or something, he owes them a little something for paying him that huge bonus.

I think gamestop giftcards would be more appropriate.

Game Informer subscriptions, duh.

Vulture capitalism working as intended.

My friend stupidly tried to stop by EB today, the day of release, to try and buy R-Type Final 2. I rightly predicted failure since they only stock enough for preorders but stopped allowing preorders at a cutoff date prior to release date.

He’s one of the few people who is part of the buy used physical for less than $5 off new price and then trades back for pennies on the dollar. The numbers on this have never seemed remotely worth it to me, only to GameStop.

Never tries to sell privately but just gets so little on store trade in.

R-TYPE Final 2 isn’t a great example for this stuff - NIS America has been having distribution issues with most of their recent releases, so even preordered copies aren’t available yet.

I got mine yesterday from Amazon.

I preordered through Amazon in February and was told earlier this week that I won’t get my copy until mid-May. The same thing happened with the last NIS America release I bought, Saviors of Sapphire Wings, and that game was backordered on Amazon on launch day back in March. This time Amazon just seems to be screwing me over, since the product listing for RTF2 says it’s in stock for the platform I preordered for and can be delivered by Wednesday.

Yeah, something weird is going on there. Call em up?

Soo this is on the move again along with AMC (I own this one) and I heard some news today that may just be an ace card for them.

Their core business is reselling games, we all know this. Nerd stuff is good and they can keep that going but it’s not going to sustain their business. With digital games taking over they are basically in a death spiral.

Unless they could somehow figure out a way to trade digital games or in game digital assets.

https://nft.gamestop.com/

I wouldn’t count them out just yet because that is pretty brilliant.

Plus its gonna squeeze again :)