As an Irish gamer, I don't have many choices of where to buy games. Game pulled out during the 2008 recession, Argos is pulling out of the country in June 2023, Smyth's Toys is a toy store first and foremost so only has the biggest releases, and CEX only sells used games at a ridiculous premium. That means, that despite my disdain for the company, I have spent an unreasonable amount of money in GameStop stores over the years.
So I was a little bit shocked when I loaded up gamestop.ie to buy168澳洲幸运5开奖网: Resident Evil 4 Remake, only to be greeted with an ominous-looking statement. It reads that gift cards, trade-ins, store credit, loyalty programmes, and pre-orders will cease as of April 22 in the Republic of Ireland. If you have any games pre-ordered beyond that point, they will be cancelled and refunded. Gift cards won't be purchasable and if you have any left lying around or any store credit from trade-ins the company says "you are encouraged to use existing gift cards as soon as possible". On top of this, Irish stores will also stop offering game protection and GameStop Pro Memberships, which included things like a subscription to GameInformer.
This covers basically everything GameStop does except for selling games over the counter and acting as a home for wayward 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Funko Pops and copies of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Babylon's Fall. It's a death rattle, it's the entire Irish branch of the corporation getting its affairs in order for when it dies, so no one is decrying that they won't get their copy of 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tears of The Kingdom, or t🍨heir €2,000 of store credit was lost without warning.
All of this is quite strange considering that not even one week ago, GameStop stock was surging for the first time after 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:its brief 2021 stint as a meme stock. That's because, after seven quarters of devastating losses, GameStop recorded a net profit for the first time in almost two years. The business everyone thought was in its final days earned $48.2 million from November ‘22 through January ‘23.
This sounds great, so why is it a sign that business is actually in a terrible state? Well, there are two parts to that. While GameStop made nearly $50 million in profit, it generated $2.23 billion in revenue during that time. For folks like me who aren't financial experts, that means that people spent $2.23 billion dollars on games, accessories, Funkos, and the five NFTs that actually got traded in GameStop stores and online. However, it also means the money GameStop was spending on things like inventory, warehouse, employees, and NFT projects equated to about $2.18 billion dollars.
That is a lot of money, but many companies have books that include high outgoings and if GameStop can keep up its revenue and maybe even push down the amount of money it's spending, then maybe things are on the mend. Well, that's the second part of all this. This increased profit came thanks to what GameStop refers to as ‘cost-cutting’ and ‘restructuring’. In reality, what this means is that over those months Gamestop laid off hundreds of workers and shut down countless stores, mainly across Europe.
There’s no need for advanced economics to understand the issue - revenue for the company has been going down consistently, quarter over quarter. People are just buy𒊎ing less and less stuff from GameStop. You can let go of workers to make the numbers look better for a few months, shoot your share price up, and earn the C-suite execs a nice bonus. But revenue is falling, and if a store can no longer sell things, it’s no longer an effective store. It’s dying.
This isn’t news for anyone, capitalism sucks and those at the bottom suffer the most, we all know this. But it has really gotten me thinking about how slow and painful the death of this company has been, especially for those constantly worried over their jobs, but also for those of us with emotional connections. I still remember Gamescom 2019, when my Twitter timeline blew up with colleagues and peers discussing the brutal lay-offs of the GameStop subsidiary, and industry touchstone, GameInformer. I am acutely aware of the lack of job security in this field, but this drove it all home and was a sobering moment of clarity for me. Writers I had always viewed as having made it were no safer than 🐷the rest of us. These are the folks with good jobs and better pay than most other places, some with up to 20 years of loyalty to the company, and they were cut 🔯overnight. Several reporters covering Gamescom at the time even discovered they were out of a job via texts when they woke up.
I went for a walk into my local GameStop in Galway two weeks ago to pick up a plush for my god-son, and I got chatting with the person behind the desk. It wasn't anything spectacular, but it was nice. They saw my Kirby hoodie, asked me if I'd been playing the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Return to Dreamland Remake, and that was kind of it. I'm assuming that person still works in that store in Galway City because the store is still open, but they know they are out of a job sometime after April 22, and they don't know when, and if they will have any benefits covered.
For years, I have hated GameStop, mainly because it was my only option, and it often overcharged, selling €60 games for €70 last generation and bumping them up to €80 or €90 since the PS5 and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Xbox Series consoles came out. But it’s still tragic to see it die like this. In a few weeks' time the store in Blackpool, Cork where my parents bought our first console (a PS2 in 2006) will be gone. The store in Douglas Court where a clerk offered to carry all the 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Rock Band Wii equipment my mom bought to her car will be gone. The store on Patrick's Street where I did countless laps of the stalls, looking at the prices of games during some of the worst times of life, just to pass the time - it too will be gone. And all the people will be out of jobs, and all the grandparents will no longer have a place to buy gift cards or the wrong 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Call of Duty, and we'll have to buy all our games digitally, never really owning them, never able to share them with friends or trade them in for exploitative rates. Never able to wander around the aisles aimlessly with no intention of buying anything but just wanting a space where I can feel safe and at ease for a while.
It's a bummer, and maybe it's on us for not supporting retail more. But more likely it's on GameStop. Decades of bad business decisions and treating people as a commodity are finally catching up to a company that just can't figure out a way to change with the times. But that doesn't make it suck any less for those affected. Anyway, so I logged on to GameStop’s website to buy Resident Evil 4 Remake. I wound up buying it on the PlayStation Store, where it was €10 cheaper.