GameStop is doomed, water is wet, and other observations | This Week in Business
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GameStop is doomed.
That's the mood following the company's quarterly earnings report this week, which saw a net loss of $50.5 million and the termination of CEO Matt Furlong, the sixth man to head up the company since 2017.
But GameStop has been doomed for a very long time.
This is not a secret, and it is not a particularly insightful observation. The spectre of digital distribution has been haunting the brick-and-mortar physical game retailer for literal decades, and management has been trying to adapt to it just as long.
Future GameStop merger partner Electronics Boutique launched its downloadable PC game rental store EB1 in June of 2001. (It died about a year later.)
After EB and GameStop merged, the two companies launched their own digital distribution stores for PC games in 2006, just about a year after Valve first started selling third-party games on Steam, and long before Steam was the platform-dominating force we know today.
It made its aspirations to emulate Amazon clear for the first time when it launched a $100 million Digital Ventures push to make "a world class e-commerce and digital business platform that fortifies our leadership in the multi-channel videogame entertainment industry."
It got into Web games by acquiring Kongregate in 2010.
2011 saw it jump on board the social gaming bandwagon with a new storefront on Facebook and give digital distribution another crack with the acquisition of Stardock System's Impulse. It also acquired cloud gaming
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