Their X feed is kind of wild, I can’t lie.
I’m sure we are all well aware of GameStop’s many misguided desicions, but this most recent choice is a very interesting one! Let’s talk about it!
May is mental health awareness month. If you need assistance in finding help, or you would like to donate to help others get the help they need, visit https://mhanational.org/
SOURCES
https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1326380/000119312526202468/d138475dex99.htm
https://finance.yahoo.com/markets/stocks/articles/ebay-says-half-cash-half-162705157.html https://kotaku.com/new-gamestop-program-leads-employees-to-lie-to-customer-1791874332
https://www.coindesk.com/business/2026/01/24/gamestop-s-usd420-million-bitcoin-move-sparks-speculation-of-selling
https://investor.gamestop.com/news-releases/news-details/2026/GameStop-Announces-Long-Term-Performance-Award-for-Ryan-Cohen/default.aspx
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.themarketinggateway.com
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
So one of my first-ever full-time jobs was being a video game store manager for a shopping mall retailer called Electronics Boutique, which branded a lot of its mall and strip mall stores in the early 2000s as EB Games.
Electronics Boutique started out in the late 1970s as a kiosk in the King of Prussia mall outside Philadelphia, Pennsylvania selling digital watches and pocket calculators.
It gradually moved into selling computers and software before pivoting into video games in the 1990s.
Its chief competitors at the time were retailers like Software, Etc., Babbage’s and FuncoLand, all of which got transformed into a larger company called GameStop initially led by Len Riggio, the investor who’d revitalized Barnes & Noble into a major brand.
GameStop adopted very similar branding and a similar store design to EB Games, and it was in 2005 that GameStop acquired the company in North America and absorbed it into their own brand.
Fun fact: my last week on the job in 2007 happened to be the exact week when they replaced our store sign and we had to start saying, “Thank you for calling GameStop” on the phone.
I was happy to be out of there, because, and I guess it’s OK to say this about 20 years later – I hated working for GameStop, because they were an objectively awful company that made every day of my life miserable that final year.
Their approach to paying for this big, expensive merger was to cut hours, cut bonuses, require more of managers and make us push sales for pre-orders for video games that were coming out.
It all felt very Blockbuster Video during a time when that video rental brand was on the way out.
I’m bringing all this up because GameStop is basically on its way out too, and today’s news involves GameStop’s very desperate bid to purchase eBay using a rather strange proposal that eBay’s board just rejected.
This is a marketing podcast, so I don’t want to get too into the nuts and bolts of the financial mechanisms involved here, but let’s just say it’s like a bunch of kids working at a lemonade stand shaking a jar of change and telling the ice cream truck they’ve got enough money to buy him out of business once their dads get home and pay the rest of the tab.
There is just no way that this was ever going to happen, and it’s very likely a desperate move on the part of activist investor and CEO Ryan Cohen to get GameStop in the news so that its stock price will increase.
Unfortunately, the move has backfired, and GameStop has already seen its stock price steadily drop since the announcement was made.
And how bad does your offer have to be for eBay to put out a press release not only rejecting it but saying it’s neither “credible nor attractive?” That’s basically business code words for “ugly and stupid.”
And why is GameStop even trying to embark down this path in the first place? Well, as it turns out, GameStop has a long history of doing really strange things that have hurt its own business, and a lot of their problems stem from, you guessed it, really terrible marketing decisions.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this is the Marketing Gateway.
So, I’ve talked about my EB Games experiences before on The Marketing Gateway, but I haven’t really detailed what happened when GameStop took over the company, mainly because I wasn’t there for it.
I’m glad I wasn’t.
It was a mess.
It started with GameStop going on a spending spree to buy out a lot of their competition.
They acquired Rhino Video Games from Blockbuster and the European retailers Free Record Shop and Micromania in 2007 and 2008.
Unfortunately for GameStop, one of the biggest changes in video gaming at the time was that everything was starting to move digital.
iTunes was already disrupting the recording industry, online on-demand video was already disrupting DVD and Blu-Ray sales for the film and television industries, and video games were starting to be disrupted by Sony, Microsoft and Nintendo starting their own digital platforms and a computer platform called Steam that allowed gamers to purchase computer games and download them directly to their PCs.
GameStop’s biggest money-maker was people trading in secondhand video games and hardware they could then turn around and sell for a profit of at least 2-5x what they’d paid to buy them.
It wasn’t possible for gamers to resell their digital games, though.
So GameStop started trying to diversify by buying its way into digital distribution.
It acquired Jolt Online Gaming and Kongregate, which were both browser-based platforms for casual gamers.
It bought two software platforms called Spawn Labs and Impulse so it could try to offer its own streaming service and digital distribution services.
It tried to get into electronics resale with the acquisition of secondhand consumer electronics retailer BuyMyTronics and an ownership stake in Simply Mac, a retail brand designed to resell Apple products.
It tried to get into wireless mobile phone services by acquiring AT&T mobile phone retailer Spring Mobile and then later acquiring and trying to operate over 500 AT&T store chains.
It also tried to get into youth marketing with a pop-up concept called GameStop Kids.
And it also acquired an online media company called Geeknet, which owned a popular online retailer called ThinkGeek, for which GameStop even opened dozens of retail stores.
Everything up until this point might sound bad in hindsight, but these were sane, sensible moves for a company that knew the business was going to change eventually thanks to digital distribution.
And GameStop still managed to have a strong handle on specialist distribution of video games, hardware, accessories, gift cards and merchandise.
But the problem was that GameStop had a growing reputation for being a really terrible place to both shop and work, and the executive management’s marketing decisions were based on growth through acquisition, not through focusing on their retail experience.
Cracks started to form in this strategy before long.
So, for example, digital distribution and streaming didn’t work out, and both Spawn Labs and Impulse were shut down in 2014.
GameStop’s rapid and aggressive expansion into Europe met a lot of pushback from consumers, and GameStop actually had to withdraw from some European countries like the UK, Northern Ireland, Portugal and Spain.
GameStop’s revenues from digital distribution started to decline as gamers stopped going to GameStop stores to make digital purchases with their trade-in credit from secondhand games, hardware and accessories and instead just began buying games directly from platforms like PlayStation Network, Xbox, Nintendo eShop and Steam.
And then in 2017, the news broke that GameStop’s retail employees were feeling trapped by a policy called Circle of Life where onerous metrics were leading to individual employees being targeted and put under considerable performance pressure.
Customers often wanted to walk into GameStop stores and buy new games, but GameStop wanted them to consider secondhand games, or trade in their old games, or pre-order something or purchase a rewards card.
Employees who could not link the sale of a new game to one of those behaviors were held accountable.
The policy was not only viewed as unfair and punitive and led many employees to feel they needed to lie to customers to meet quotas, such as telling customers they didn’t have copies of new games or discouraging them from purchasing brand new hardware.
If a customer wouldn’t buy these products secondhand, they were sent elsewhere, like to a big box store or the GameStop website, to make those purchases.
This misguided program not only led to many good employees being disciplined or fired, but also upset customers when a gaming website called Kotaku wrote a piece about it.
The whole point of GameStop’s existence was supposed to be the availability of video games – why would the corporation discourage employees from selling new copies of games by creating metrics that were antagonistic to both the customers and the retail store staff?
GameStop also started adjusting its inventory practices, first flooding its stores with non-gaming merchandise such as t-shirts, collectibles, collectible trading cards and Funko Pops, but also requiring stores to work as fulfillment centers for online sales, giving the already overworked skeleton crews staffing stores a large number of online orders to process each day.
During the busier fourth quarter of the year, sales staff had to choose between helping customers or filling online orders.
And unfortunately, online orders couldn’t pile up or the employees would be held responsible.
And ThinkGeek, that beloved internet brand, withered and died in GameStop’s hands, shuttering its online store in 2019, just four years into GameStop’s ownership of it and closing all its retail stores not long after.
GameStop altered the brand so significantly that customers abandoned it, and one of the biggest mistakes they made was in dropping all of the things that had made ThinkGeek special – its weird culture, its April Fools gags that sometimes would become actual products, its strange assortment of the odd and unusual – and instead replaced it with a bunch of branded merchandise similar to what GameStop was already selling.
These are all marketing mistakes of the highest order.
But we haven’t even gotten to the really stupid stuff yet, which is instead driven by the financial side of the business.
In January of 2018, GameStop’s CEO resigned due to having a brain tumor.
He sadly died two months later.
But over the next year, GameStop had a revolving door of CEOs that created such a crisis for investors that in 2020, investors began demanding a stockholder CEO.
And had the COVID-19 pandemic not occurred and slowed everything down to a crawl, things might have moved faster.
GameStop treated its employees horribly during 2020, by the way.
It had about 5500 stores worldwide at the time and suggested that its employees were essential workers who needed to violate the stay at home order while failing to provide them with proper personal protective equipment and cleaning supplies.
Many hedge funds and investors began taking short positions on GameStop, believing that it was doomed.
Many analysts compared it to Blockbuster Video in its waning days.
But in 2021, management finally did change, and that’s when Ryan Cohen stepped in as chairman and Matt Furlong stepped in as CEO.
Matt obviously didn’t make it long in that role – Ryan is the current CEO, and he’s one of those multi-billionaires who presumes that every move he makes is right and it’s everyone else who’s wrong.
Case in point – GameStop tried to sell off its French business last year and Ryan Cohen sarcastically posted on X that the sale would include “wokeness and DEI at no additional cost. ”
Lovely guy.
He made all his money with a lucky bet on the website Chewy, which he co-founded and then sold to PetSmart for billions of dollars.
He also got extraordinarily lucky betting on Bed, Bath & Beyond in 2022 before it went under, but he and his firm RC Ventures are being sued for insider trading on the nearly $50 million they netted from that exchange.
So when I tell you that Ryan Cohen is known as the “king of the meme stock,” it might make the most recent chapter of GameStop’s story make more sense, because three things happened that have all made GameStop even more volatile:
- GameStop became a meme stock in January 2021 due to a bunch of online investors on Reddit and coattail-riding hedge funds investing in it to trigger what’s known as a short squeeze. This helped GameStop ultimately gain a ton of unexpected revenue as its stock price briefly surged to about 30 times its original value. It’s worth a fraction of that now.
- GameStop announced in May of 2021 it was starting a platform for NFTs – non-fungible tokens – to take advantage of that corner of the larger blockchain fad. This move was enormously unpopular, and GameStop announced in early 2024 it was shuttering he marketplace completely
- In May of 2025, GameStop announced it was purchasing 4,710 Bitcoin, which analysts estimate cost about $504 million. By the start of this year, that holding would have been worth $368.4 million, or about 75% of its purchased value, though GameStop claims it has not sold the Bitcoin off yet. I’m not sure what they’re waiting for, because that’s a lot of money to tie up in a volatile cryptocurrency.
All three of these occurrences point to GameStop being run by investors who are trying to figure out how to cash out, not by managers who are trying to keep the company afloat.
And Ryan Cohen is reportedly hoping to trigger a huge bonus he was promised by the board if he can get the market cap for GameStop up to $100 billion, a deal he made in exchange for accepting no guaranteed pay in his role as CEO this year.
It’s a wild situation that’s likely doomed for failure.
GameStop is not in a healthy place today.
Last year, they closed 600 of their stores in the US and they’re closing another 400-500 this year.
They claim to have 1,600 stores in the US at the moment, but it’s anyone’s guess how many of those will survive into 2027. And that’s not including the European stores they’re closing or trying to sell off.
Their biggest problem at the moment is that they have a retail footprint and they have staff, but they don’t have customers.
That’s why the eBay offer is so strange.
Ryan Cohen’s weird idea is to use these stores as fulfillment centers for eBay, but the most curious thing he’s promising is reducing eBay’s marketing spend by $1.
2 billion, which is about half of what eBay spent on marketing in 2025 to acquire 1 million additional net active buyers.
That, by the way, means that if these numbers are right, eBay spent $2,400 per customer in its customer acquisition costs for 2025 which is… a lot.
But we have no idea if that number represents a positive or negative ROI, and we also don’t know what the payback period is or the churn rate is.
eBay’s a pretty mature business, so they may be close to their limit for growth.
They may also indeed have far more potential than they’re realizing, but it really seems like a predominantly brick and mortar business that’s in danger of disappearing is probably not going to be a very valuable brand consultant to them.
Securities analysts have long been saying that GameStop’s stock is overvalued and that its business practices are unsustainable.
They are often compared to Blockbuster Video for being a dinosaur that doesn’t know it’s about to go extinct, but I’d actually argue it’s worse than that.
GameStop knows it’s doomed, and it’s trying desperately to make a lot of noise to reassure us that it’s healthy and vibrant when a walk into any GameStop store would tell you otherwise.
So let me close by mentioning this.
It was because I was so frustrated with GameStop’s terrible marketing practices that I decided to go back to school, finish my business degree and get into the field of marketing myself.
I wanted to know how these people sitting in an office in Grapevine, Texas could make decisions that really impacted me as a store manager but which were seemingly being made without any actual feedback or knowledge of what was happening in our stores day to day.
GameStop was, to use eBay’s wording, neither “credible nor attractive” enough to keep me as an employee, and that forced me to better myself.
So I guess I owe them for keeping me from being content as a retail manager and forcing me onto a path that allowed me to be telling their story to you today, not as an insider, but a very jaded outsider! Well done, GameStop.
You are truly terrible at what you do, and I’m a better person because of it.
And to all the GameStop front-line employees who are suffering right now, let me encourage you to do what I did and finish your college degree! A better life awaits you than going into work every day wondering if it’s going to be your last.
I’m Sean in St. Louis, and this has been The Marketing Gateway.
See ya next time!
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