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Forum - View topicGameStop in Talks for Potential Buyout
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devoninacoffin
Posts: 4 |
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Given the fact that their stores owed 7 years of taxes in Puerto Rico, closed stores and fled soon after the news got out, I'm not surprised. That said, they sure took their time with this.
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Lord Oink
Posts: 876 |
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Haven't been to a Gamestop in many years. I hear they're glorified Funko Pop sellers these days, though.
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mgosdin
 Posts: 1302 Location: Kissimmee, Florida, USA |
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I've been in their stores here locally off and on for years. Usually when one of my sons wants a newly released game. They've gone thru a number of "phases", at one time they were buying and selling used MP3 players and Cell Phones, now it's Funko & similar "Pop" items.
I suppose they may be the next "ToysRUs". Mark Gosdin |
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Freyanne
 Posts: 216 |
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This doesn't surprise me. I rarely go into GameStop unless it's a video game that I can't easily find anywhere else and I don't want to use Amazon. I mainly buy games from Best Buy nowadays, until my Gamer's Club discount ends next year (they discontinued the program about a month ago, iirc).
Basically. I'd say that nowadays, at least a 1/3rd of the store is Funko Pops and various anime/cartoon/video game figures and merchandise. They're not as bad as Hot Topic when it comes to having a bunch of Funko Pops in stores, though. |
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GeorgeC
Posts: 795 |
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I think GameStop may be on the way out unless the next CEO and owners do something to shake things up and turn it around.
I've been kind of wondering for a while when the game industry would go through a downturn in retail. Apparently, it has been going on for a while but that story gets buried under the numbers for the gaming industry which is still doing well despite the perception for the past 10 years that there hasn't been much in the way of innovation. The consoles are more powerful than ever and can do about everything you can think of BUT the games are stale and everything is a franchise or fancy repackage of a 20-30 year-old game series! (Ironically, in Japan, at least, consoles aren't anywhere as big as they used to be. Mobile's been the word since the PS3 generation unless that's changed. I had the impression that the really good-selling console in Japan was the PS2. XBox has never been a factor there and the PS3 never had more than soft to middling sales. I can't imagine PS4 is doing much better and both the PS2 and PS3 were supported well past what Sony originally thought they were going to around for even though the game consoles stopped being manufactured at least 2 years before last games for those systems shipped!) Really, GameStop is the last major videogame retailer... They basically bought out or replaced Software Etc, Babbages, Electronics Boutique, and maybe 1 or 2 other chains that sold console games and PC games. There was talk of GameStop selling comics on spinner racks but I don't know that's going to happen. You basically can't sell traditional comics outside of a comic shop anymore. I know Barnes & Noble had a last experiment and they just stopped selling monthlies (a very limited amount from DC) in the last month. People buy trades from bookstores and outside of comic shops anyway... As mentioned before, when chains get desperate, they go through these phases with various product. I can't stand the POP toys and most of the action figures and statues sold now are junk, too. I can remember the Borders bookstore chain in the area reorganizing the stores a few times in their last desperate years (they closed 2008, 2010?) trying to turn around sales. They downscaled their music section, emphasized graphic novels or manga, and basically changed around the store. It didn't help those stores and it just drove the regular customers like me crazy trying to renavigate the stores. |
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EricJ2
 Posts: 4016 |
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They are--They still do big business in used-game sales (no matter how badly I'm still trying to get a copy of Overwatch, I ain't payin' $60 for it), but new-game sales have pretty much been taken over by consoles' own download networks, and the stores' game business is mostly in months-ahead pre-orders with bonus incentives. At one point, Gamestop was talking about including game rentals, as a few years ago, the chain was almost completely demoralized that they were selling product that the customers would invariably sell back when they were finished: "We've become a pawnshop!" I'm no supporter of digital movies over disk, but games are an ephemeral enough product that I can see download becoming the preferable market--There are very few games we want to keep on our shelves after playing, and those who binge regularly, it's too much trouble to dig out the disk. |
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-SP-
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Old News, but there is really no point in buying the physical copy of games unless you are a collector. Even when you buy the physical disk, you still have to download the game for some reason. Your going to end up downloading the game whether you buy the game digitally or physically, so it's more convenient just to get it digitally also the fact that you don't have to insert the disk to play it which saves time when you switch between games.
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scarfhero
Posts: 1 |
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ill buy them for 3.50$ lmao
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Tenchi
 Posts: 4471 Location: Ottawa... now I'm an ex-Anglo Montrealer. |
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I haven't bought anything from EB Games (re: Gamestop in Canada) in a couple of years due to lack of a current gen console but that'll finally be changing soon so I'm glad that buying new games on physical media from a bricks-and-mortar location will likely continue to be an option for me for the time being even if I know this buyout, if it goes through, will only delay the inevitable for a few years at most.
When game companies stop selling new games on physical media that I can play offline, I will cease purchasing new games altogether and will stick to buying old games on physical media as I have largely been doing lately anyway (the most recent "new" game I have is the XBox 360 down-port of Forza Horizon 2 and that's from 2014). |
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wingweaver84
Posts: 74 |
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That's one of the reasons I haven't been buying new games,the lack of physical media. Another five or ten years and all games are going to be digital. There are also no more computers manufactured-or close to no more-that are sold with disc drives,either. What's next,the phasing out of SD drives?I would freak out if that happened. You're pretty much paying for two things when you buy a game,anyway:the case and the disc the game is on. One of the last games I bought didn't include the disc,though. It was a slip of paper with a serial code to DOWNLOAD the game. (This was for the Cities of Tomorrow expansion for SimCity) |
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WingKing
Posts: 617 |
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And the instruction manual if they still print one, but a lot of games don't even do that anymore. This whole trend of digital/virtual download/rent-to-own kind of media consumption sucks for me because I'm old school. If I'm buying something I want to OWN it, I don't want to be spending money to "buy" something that's at the mercy of a network hack or a company going bankrupt and taking everything you paid for down with them (like what happened to Jmanga's members). At least I knew Borders wasn't going to come knock on my door and take back all the books I bought from them when they closed down. And I'm also the type of person that when I find a favorite book or a favorite game, I like being able to enjoy it over and over again. I've never sold a video game back to a store, and I've only sold back maybe a dozen music CDs over the past 20 years. |
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wingweaver84
Posts: 74 |
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I'm an old school player too. First system was an Atari 2600,then an NES. And frankly,if I pay money for a game,I don't care what copyright or some other thing says. I have every right to back up my games and try to play them when discs are finally fully phased out.(By this I mean downloading backup copies and ripping the discs;I don't recommend SHARING them but if they're for your own personal use then I don't see a problem). I'd move them to an SD card that will hold them. |
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CastMember1991
 Posts: 858 |
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Why would they sell themselves to private equity firms? That's the stupidest thing any retailer would do; not to mention it will put you into a lot of debt or - even worse - liquidation, just look at what happened to Toys "R" Us.
Walmart or Amazon would be much better choices for buyers in my opinion, that way there would be a better chance of being able to avoid filing for bankruptcy. Amazon in particular has very, very deep pockets. Their recent acquisition of Whole Foods proves that a mainly e-commerce business can succeed in operating brick-and-mortar stores as well. |
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TheOtakuX
 Posts: 344 Location: Wooster, Ohio |
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To be fair, the reason they've started selling so many pops and other such non-game stuff is because they bought ThinkGeek, so GameStop now doubles as a physical location for ThinkGeek.
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jr240483
 Posts: 4385 Location: New York City,New York,USA |
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that cant be right! i just renewed my gamer's club membership with best buy this week. its anything but discontinued from what i've seen! also there is another thing that no one might have figured out that is also hurting gamestop. rental sites like gamefly! if there is overall culprit on why gamestop is at this point, its gamefly! i mean those ads they first posted pretty much said it all when a gamer decides to do a trade in! |
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