Summary
- GameStop is silently closing stores in the US, leaving customers and employees shocked and disappointed.
- The decline of GameStop is evident as its physical locations have decreased by almost a third.
- Customers and employees are sharing closures on social media platforms, hinting at a troubling future for the company.
GameStop appears to be closing many of its stores across the United States, often with little to no warning, leaving loyal customers in shocked disappointment. While there doesn’t seem to be any official announcement from GameStop about an increase in store closures, customers and employees have been active since the start of the year in reporting their newly or soon-to-be-closed stores on social media.
The largest physical retailer of new and used video games in the world, GameStop has a history that dates back more than 44 years, when it was known as Babbage’s. The first location was opened in a Dallas, Texas suburb in August 1980 with the financial backing of former U.S. presidential candidate Ross Perot, and by its peak in 2015, the brand was represented by more than 6,000 worldwide locations and was reporting about $9 billion in annual sales. But its numbers have dwindled over the last nine years as game sales have shifted to a predominantly digital format, and as of February 2024, GameStop’s physical location numbers had been cut by nearly one-third, with around 3,000 of those stores located in the United States, according to data collection site ScrapeHero.
Related
GameStop is Leaving 1 Major Country
GameStop will be shutting down all retail store locations in one major country in the near future as the company tries to adapt.
Following a December 2024 regulatory report suggesting GameStop was closing more stores in the near future, which was filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission, both customers and employees of GameStop locations have been sharing their discoveries of closed locations on platforms like Twitter and Reddit. Some, like Twitter user @one-big-boss, lamented the closing of his favorite location, which he saw as a good source for buying cheap games and consoles. He said that particular location seemed to still be popular and successful, and he views its upcoming closure as a bad sign of things to come for less-busy locations. Many employees have also chimed in, with one Canadian worker complaining about “ridiculous goals” as the company’s higher-ups assess which stores to keep open.
GameStop Customers Keep Seeing Stores Close
The recent reporting of closed GameStop locations is a continuing trend for the declining game retailer. A report from Reuters in March 2024 predicted a bleak future for GameStop, showing the company had closed 287 of its stores over the prior year following fourth-quarter 2023 numbers that saw revenue dip by nearly 20 percent, or roughly $432 million, compared to the same period in 2022.
Over the past several years, there have been many plans to save GameStop from sources inside and outside the company. As its customer base has shifted to buying video games online, the company has tested many other strategies, from an increase in video game-related toys and apparel to dipping its toes in entirely different industries, like phone trade-ins and trading card grading. Meanwhile, the company received a lifeline in 2021 from a group of amateur investors on Reddit, whose exploits have been immortalized in works like the Netflix documentary Eat the Rich: The GameStop Saga, and the film Dumb Money.
