"Game" may be right there in the name, but brick and mortar video game store
Retail sales of gaming hardware and software may still be profitable, but one can't blame this company for getting a little bit antsy. This new generation of consoles is digital native, and both Sony and Microsoft have a lot of good reasons to capture the retail end of the console space by pushing their own virtual storefronts. A digital-only future is still a way off, but there's no way to consider physical game sales as any kind of growth market. Used games currently form a good chunk of GameStop's business, but companies are attempting to cut into that with steep discounts on older digital games.
One only needs to look as far as PC gaming for a certain kind of warning -- in that space, Valve's Steam Store has all but replaced physical copies of games, and it's not out of the realm of possibility that something similar could happen to console games. It's a bleak outlook.
Mobile, on the other hand, is still looking good. The way I see it, the best way forward for GameStop is to apply a similar business model to mobile that it has employed for used games in the past. I have a certain (sometimes misguided) sense that buying a used game from GameStop is going to work, something I rarely have for used mobile devices. If GameStop can extend the same kind of reputation to other gadgets, it could make itself the go-to store for used devices. Raines says that Simply Mac has Cupertino's blessing to move forward, which is most certainly a boon.
I'm always shocked by just how many GameStops I see around, which, it would seem, was for good reason. A rollback makes sense in this case.
