“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…
They’re not going to stop selling games, it’s just gonna be code cards now. They’ll still work out deals with the publishers for exclusive sales, and of course they’re still going to be selling consoles and handhelds.
It’s going to be irrelevant, why bothering going in a physical store and get bombarded with upsells to get a GS+ subscription for getting just a download code that can be downloaded from your couch?
Download codes are the reason the PC section in all game stores is missing or extremely tiny
Because not everyone has or wants credit cards. Children can’t get credit cards. Code cards are also useful for gifts.
I think you are right that even less people will buy them than physical games, but I don’t think they will be irrelevant.
It depends on the growth, it it’s 12 and falling it’s irrelevant.
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.
How long do your homebrew cards last? It’s hard enough to make good cards at home that I think CardsAgainst Humanity has them publically available since it’s still cheaper for them to print than you would spend for a small batch.
And how do you keep your decks from being overpowered?
It’s tough to comment on how long they last, because it’s going to depend on how often you play. So I started proxying 4 years ago and haven’t had any problems yet, but I also sleeve them as though they were genuine, and only play maybe one game a week.
As for avoiding overpowered decks, I’ve been playing with the same group of guys for nearly 25 years. We’ve worked out where we like to be, and self-balance for fun. It helps that I’m a total Johnny, so I can whiff a game completely and still have fun as long as I “did the thing.”
If you’re just asking how to avoid overpowered decks just because of the ability to print proxies, people with big budgets (or a long history of playing) can get all those actual cards already and there’s banned and restricted lists for each format (and the formats themselves also help, as they limit which sets are legal, so standard doesn’t have to worry about interactions between new cards and every single card made in history).
And for more casual games (that ignore ban lists or allow custom cards), there’s the whole dynamic of “if I always play my deck that just stomps everyone by turn 2, eventually no one will want to play with me, other than to throw their overpowered decks at it, so I’ll save the extreme ones for special occasions”.
Dogs do the same! When big dogs play tug, there’s a certain percentages of times they have to lose if they want to keep playing, no matter how much bigger or stronger they are.
It’s such a controversial opinion, but outside of playable games etc… people are basically buying (with ‘collectibles’) the equivalent of bacon and eggs arranged in a happy face to make a kid giggle. What the fuck are people doing with their lives where they need to have a picture of some cartoon character or a bobblehead of it?
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.
I hope eBay doesn’t get enshitified more as it is. I’m still pissed off with Facebook marketplace replacing Craigslist for buying local second hand shit.
And Ebay has been going to absolute shit for a while now. FB marketplace and Amazon absolutely gutted two of their core profit centers.
Their CEO is a clown, that’s a big reason why
Likewise, CEOs are irrelevant to game quality.
I would say detrimental to game quality.
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
I’m just happy they are still around either way. Considering how expensive video gaming is getting…I don’t blame anyone from pivoting from it and playing other types of games.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
ThinkGeek?
Well, GameStop does have experience running ThinkGeek into the ground.
Gamestop has always sucked at selling games, so I guess, in some strange way, it checks out.
What the hell even is our economy anymore?
Memes, mostly. Lots of memes.
Edit: just noticed the weird box. I’m too lazy to redo it.
Use this space to imagine I posted the fixed meme
deleted by creator
I mean, I don’t know that he’s wrong. It’s just weird to hear someone say it.
AI speculation.
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.
He is saying it’s irrelevant to the future of the company. Obviously it still has material impact on the current revenue. Sony is going to stop selling disks by 2028. So, new software essentially has to be materially irrelevant by then and used software will likely drop consistently after.
These days, they are an insult to gamers.
No worries, our plan is just to become to games what Hot Topic is to music.
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.
Soooo mini figs?
yup, all sortz of plastic crack basically. low cost/high margin product
Kids gambling!
They already were that…
Ceo (who the cult worships) did like 4 huge stock offerings and diluted the float around 300%. Any moass short play is dead but a lot of them are sunk cost fallacy trapped.
The stock is still undervalued, that’s all that matters.
Moass or not, people are investing in Cohen, and the man is a genius. He’s taking GameStop from strength to strength.
You can argue with all the data supporting the moass thesis, but you cannot argue with the excellent fundamentals. Especially in this economy.
Imo, it’s free money regardless.
Edit: to add aswell, the fact they’re gearing up to acquisition eBay is a huge deal.
Its funny how they always say shit like I’m smooth brain, I just buy. And yeah, they continuously buy GME at set intervals, which… is what normal investors do (sans diversify). Full circle
Just change the store name to Stop.
Because GAME already went broke.
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. 🙄
bro nothing makes me less interested in knowing a person than finding out they have a funko pop collection
Personaly i think that, using “bro” in a comment, not using capitalization or punctuation marks and belittling other peoples hobbies is also good sign that somebody has nothing of value to say in life.
bro thinks funko pops are a hobby 🤣
The amount of negativity here is very positive. Somebody somewhere has an agenda to think they’re doing badly as a business 😜
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
Literally why the only game carts I buy are any with the game still physically on it, like Mario Kart, Party, and Xenoblade
