Gamestop's shenanigans.

What do they do for the console players?

Basically they install the games onto the console hard drives, or allow you to bring your own games. They'd routinely wipe the memory though, so you'd have to reinstall the game every time - admittedly a big flaw these days due to how often games require huge day-one installations.

Works great for the P Cs though, thanks to most internet cafes creating their own software to stay on top of updating various games. Even better if you simply squirrel away your own games onto the public drive: sometimes it actually encourages other players to pick up and play whatever you're into.

Game Stop’s demise is a matter of when, not if, and they have nothing to blame but themselves for their fucking over of their customers and employees.

Recent events make the future seem brighter for game stop

OK, so lemme explain this to you guys who don't know.

So, some people were putting in money that Gamestop was gonna fail, so these kids on Reddit decided to invest in Gamestop, to drive the stock up.

Crazy enough, it worked.

Not...really.

Stocks being greatly valued and GameStop having greater capital does not mean their business model is inherently useful to the modern videogame market. They were already relying on shilling old games by underpaying the fuck out of them, abusing their employees and still refusing to change their business model.

The most likely scenario for GameStop itself, is their CEO and CFO demand to be paid in stocks (Which are now greatly overvalued), cash in, and leave.

Edited by Aszur on Jan 29th 2021 at 9:25:56 AM

Game Stop is still a failing company even if people are buying their stock. It’s going to plummet because they don’t make money from sales and their business model is unsustainable.

The short squeeze is going to end badly for the people who bought late. The stock value will plummet and they’ll lose thousands because they paid a premium for them.

As long as this whole thing doesn't get in the way of my dream of seeing Gamestop die.

This won't save an obsolete company. But it has done immeasurable harm to hedge funds, who are a far greater evil than Gamestop could even hope to be, and raised awareness among the general public that the entire concept of stocks is fake. People are more aware than ever before that corporate value has no connection to reality whatsoever and is determined solely by the whims of assholes.

Our economy literally runs on faerie dreams and unicorn farts, with corporations embracing greedier and greedier rituals as offerings to the unicorns in the hopes of swaying farts to come their way. And the more people realize that, the better.

All things considered, this is a net good.

Edited by TobiasDrake on Jan 29th 2021 at 8:40:57 AM

They got a billionaire board member with experience in E commerce. I’m not kidding when I say they might actually survive. You see that small rise before the spike? That’s actual investors noticing the shift to possible e-commerce based models.

What does GameStop plan to do that isn't already covered by Steam and other direct-download platforms?

What does the Epic storefront do that couldn't be done by Steam? What could Disney+, Peacock, HBO Max and Funimation do that couldn't be fulfilled by Crunchyroll or Netflix? The answer is withhold their make specific IPs exclusive. As such I can see a similar angle as a possible one GS could take, have exclusive deals to specific games.

Another take is that they could dabble in Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition with that same lens, while also deal in shipping collectibles and selling digital copies directly to the consumers's home. A mix of Steam and Amazon (specialized towards used games and collectables) if you will. The idea being to exploit the AAA tendency towards special editions by licensing the exclusive rights to sell them using the same way Epic buys exclusivity deals for games (minus the fact that GS would have lower initial capital to start this venture compared to Epic/Tencent) while focusing on shipping and selling used games and collectibles as a means of filling the gaps for cases where the special editions they can sell aren't enough to make the ends meet.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Jan 29th 2021 at 11:40:40 AM

Save a dying company through a high risk effort, or abscond with their ill gotten meme stock money?

What seems more likely?

You're missing the point. GameStop isn't using its stock price as collateral for its debt, so it could be at one million dollars a share or one cent a share and it wouldn't matter beans to its ongoing operations. It is clearly making moves to modernize its business model and there is some chance that these will succeed; ergo the company is likely to retain some value and not die out.

The actual issue being illustrated here is that the stock market is dangerously untethered from the real value of the companies it is supposedly investing in, and there is nothing quite so exemplary as the hedge funds shorting more shares of GME than were available to trade. Had they not done this, there would have been no leverage for the Redditors to use to force them into a squeeze and thus no headline stories on CNBC and major talk shows.

Edited by Fighteer on Jan 29th 2021 at 3:35:43 PM

Something I found interesting/amusing that I wanted to share.

So, there's a low fantasy book, A Choir of Lies that takes inspiration from the Dutch Tulip mania, having a plot involving a financial bubble built around a suddenly valuable flower.

The flower in the book is inspired by the "corpse flower" and has a bad smell in high temperatures. And IIRC also has some negative environmental effects connected to it requiring lots of water/leaching into soil. And only takes off because of the protagonist makes up b.s. about it.

When I read the book, I thought it was a bit anvilicious that a financial bubble would take off around a product that's essentially objectively worthless.

However, based on the news, I see that Reality Is Unrealistic.

Edited by Hodor2 on Jan 30th 2021 at 10:14:02 AM

<cough>Bitcoin<cough>

Edited by M84 on Jan 31st 2021 at 12:32:51 AM

Something that came out of the Game stop stuff. New Chief Tech officer and a few other former Amazon employees for the transition.