GameStop announces plans to sell off French and Canadian outlets, while its CEO yells about 'Wokeness and DEI' in bizarre, self-defeating promotion
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Ya know, when the whole GME squeeze drama was going on, it was real tempting to ride the wave, but I always smelled a rat, and IMHO, their business model was mortally wounded once direct downloads became a viable means of purchase. Without games being reliant on physical media, inventory shrank, and it seemed like most of their floor space was more focused on selling FunCo figures than games.
It didn't surprise me when Cohen started cutting jobs, and I honestly think that the stock has only been kept afloat by the Reddit Apemind and /r/wallstreetbets long past the squeeze has been squoze.
Blaming woke DEI is just a smokescreen and an excuse. Those stores were failing. All of Gamestop is failing, and Cohen's looking to blame anyone but himself.
Gamestop was a much-lampooned company with awful practices and many a horror story from employees and customers alike. I found it gross that the internet would rally behind such a company and never understood the whole thing (aside from the people with neither shame nor ethics wanting to make a buck).
It wasnt really a rally around them but against shadow markets over leveraging themselves. It could have been any company, but the data available was GameStop related.
I think you're sleeping on the nostalgia factor for a lot of old gamers who had enough cash for a bit of a "fuck you" purchase but not enough discipline to buy a rifle or enough education to know that Wall Street doesn't lose money when you buy stocks.
Wall Street doesn't lose money when you buy stocks.
Hedge funds lost a shitload though. Wallstreetbets basically engineered a short squeeze and a few hedge funds genuinely lost a ton of money covering shorts. Granted, a lot of those diamonds handers were left holding the bag, but the effect wasn't insignificant.
Some hedge funds lost money.
Others were the ones manipulating the market in the first place.
Ha you could be right. I don't live in the states didn't realize GameStop had nostalgia value.
GameStop likely could have pivoted into something akin to the Steam storefront, or fully jumped into merch/apparel sales and become something like BoxLunch for licensed video game stuff. But instead, they clung to physical games for far too long, while only dipping their toes into merch sales. And now it’s likely too late for them to fully shift into merch sales, because competitors have already had a full decade to establish themselves.
They actually tried going into merch full bore, but somehow fucked it up by buying, then destroying ThinkGeek. It was an impressively fast decline too.
It was an impressively fast decline too.
So fast that many people think they never actually intended to have it survive. They simply didn’t want to compete in the future, so they bought it before it was too big to compete with. But they had to reframe the massive purchase to shareholders as a potential profit-making venture, so they publicly stated that they were doing it to move into merch sales. And then they just nosedived it as soon as the purchase was complete, so they could shrug their shoulders and go “oops, well we tried!”
I wish physical PC games were still a thing. Not all of us have good internet.
Sadly even an offline game in a lot of cases is unplayable without gigs of updates these days.
Yeah, sigh....
I would 100% agree on that but something that has kept me apathetic throughout the whole entire shebang was the guy who saw the squeeze when the stock was worth $7 bucks double downed after the squeeze which means he was confident in his analysis that it would be worth more.
Currently the stock would be worth like $80 right now presplit. I threw my first trump covid check into that and a few other stocks and that one has just sat. I'm still in the green now and I do think one day it could go critical again but not because of Cohen.