To be fair, GameStop has essentially become an overpriced merch retailer.
this post was submitted on 16 Jul 2026
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I’m honestly surprised they haven’t merged with Hot Topic.
They did buy out ThinkGeek, so... very close.
😭 🥀 God I wish I had gotten more of those novelty homewares while I still could. I'm an adult, I accept I need a laundry basket.... but nobody else would've sold me a collapsible radioactive waste barrel.
I enjoyed the 'bloody handprint' shower curtain, but by the time I had enough money to get such items as yhr matching bloody-footprint bathmat with intention, ThG was gone for good.
I miss thinkgeek too! 😑
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“Software, it mattered in the past. Software today makes up less than 12% of the business, and collectables makes up over half the business. So, it’s totally, totally irrelevant.”
12% of your business is no way anywhere near "irrelevant."
The 12% is the reason people come and buy the other 88%
Nintendo sells more in merch than in software, they should stop too
It depends on what that 12% is.
Is it revenue, or is it profit? And does that Include both new and used games?
New games have a very small profit margin compared to used games and merch.
Fair but it seems like if you're trying to minimize the importance of something you would choose the metric that shows how minimally important it is.
If it's 12% of revenue but 1% of profit wouldn't you say it's "1%" instead of "12%"?
Might even mean 12% of business transactions/goods sold. The profit margins, customer retention, market stability, minimal losses etc might be in other goods favour.
Given how many codes/games/etc a store might order that do not sell (losses to account for), games are much less 'shelf stable' compared to a plushie of a pokemon first shown on TV 25 years ago. Digital codes and registering also make any return/exchange obligations a bigger loss.
I think there's several reasons a company might see games as a high-risk good when compared to collectibles.
I just wish they hadn't destroyed ThinkGeek.....
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Idk why everyone is making fun of this. Sony made it very clear that games are going all digital. Gamestop has to take it seriously and they have been pivoting to collectables for a while now, so they are clearly on top of this. Maybe the pivot works, maybe it doesn’t, but they aren’t just sticking their head in the sand and pretending everything is fine.
GameStop is currently making a serious effort to buy eBay, which would also give them TCGPlayer and station them as a pretty big fish in the collectible card gaming space.
It's funny to me that the same crowd of people that rail against the continued fucking over of the public by manipulative corporations are the same people who fork over hundreds of dollars for the artificial scarcity and manufactured demmand of collectible cards.
Every time I think of getting into that hobby, I get the same feeling I get when I go to the casino... like I'm just a mark.
Oh, yeah. My playgroup all gave up on buying official products years ago for that reason. Now we just buy cardstock and toner.
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Serious as viewed from GameStop's perspective, and maybe even just one man at the top. eBay has already said their offer is not remotely attractive to them. I think their current CEO unfortunately thinks the only way to run a business is to create controversy. I hope they didn't take the wrong lesson from the Gamestop stock rally, but it seems at least one person did.
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Coincidentally, GameStop is also irrelevant to Games.
Coincidentally, GameStop is also irrelevant ~~to Games~~
Used games account for over 20% of their revenue.
This information is publicly available as they are publicly traded.
This claim is a an insult to the average readers intelligence.
These days, they are an insult to gamers.
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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.
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.
I think they would if they had more than the cheap eye-candy stuff they generally have and was the greater focus of the business. They could be the Hot Topic of gaming shit.
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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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No worries, our plan is just to become to games what Hot Topic is to music.
I guess they're just "Stop" then.
Game means more then video games... Table top, board games, card games... Literally they are making bank off card games right now. They are still if not more so right now game stop then ever before.
They do all game shit now instead of just one category.
They are still cunts for doing card grading tho stupid ass shit that is
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What the hell even is our economy anymore?
Memes, mostly. Lots of memes.
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Likewise, CEOs are irrelevant to game quality.
I would say detrimental to game quality.
Just change the store name to Stop.
Because GAME already went broke.
What happened with them being a meme stock?
They leveraged the market cap to stay in business and become a generic gaming related things retail/scalper hybrid.
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This is a sad timeline where used games are becoming irrelevant and you can only pay for games that you don’t actually own and therefore can’t sell. At least the Funko Pop market is alive and well. 🙄
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I mean I can’t remember the last time I purchased a games let alone at GameStop, that place is for stocking stuffers, random merch, and maybe a used controller.
I used to buy switch games from there because I don't trust Nintendo not to do stupid shit with digital purchases or turn off their store.
Now that switch games are just key carts I'm not sure I'll be back in
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They are a collectibles and trading card company. The games have stopped
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