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Game Retailer GameStop Says It Can't Sell Itself, Sees Stock Drive 27 Percent (arstechnica.com)
GameStop announced today that it has called off a decision to find a private buyer for the company and its subsidiaries. "The announcement ushered in the public company's largest stock-value dip in over 10 years, seeing it plummet in one day from $15.49 to (as of press time) $11.28 -- a dive of roughly 27 percent," reports Ars Technica. From the report: The Texas-based gaming retailer had been linked to acquisition rumors, as The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that multiple private equity firms had been circling GameStop -- and its subsidiaries, including the merch-focused ThinkGeek and the gaming magazine Game Informer. That report had suggested a deal might close by mid-February.
However, Tuesday's statement indicated that prospective deals fell through "due to the lack of available financing on terms that would be commercially acceptable to a prospective acquirer." The rest of the statement offers little clear hint of the company's next steps beyond pumping the cash from a recent subsidiary sale into options such as "reducing the company's outstanding debt, funding share repurchases, or reinvesting in core video game and collectibles businesses to drive growth."
However, Tuesday's statement indicated that prospective deals fell through "due to the lack of available financing on terms that would be commercially acceptable to a prospective acquirer." The rest of the statement offers little clear hint of the company's next steps beyond pumping the cash from a recent subsidiary sale into options such as "reducing the company's outstanding debt, funding share repurchases, or reinvesting in core video game and collectibles businesses to drive growth."
Is 27 percent a lot to drive? Did they try the Ubers?
Though I'm never to ever be confused with someone you should seek out for financial advice, isn't the proper PR move here to game the lack of interest with a less damning press release?
Something like "We're considering the advantages of keeping the company private"
as opposed to, the rather telling, "We tried to sell out, but nobody wants us."
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
If the game packages sold there actually contained the BLOODY INSTALL DISCS. Steam has ushered in a nasty era where you walk into a bricks and mortar shop, plop down 60 bucks for a game, and get a plastic box with only a download code and a little flyer inside. What ever happened to putting actual install DVDs inside a game case? Of course people will not buy at meatspace retailers any more. There isn't much point to paying money for a plastic game box with literally nothing inside it. Now if someone managed to make dirt-cheap 40GB ROM chips for distributing software from physical stores, that might change things quite a bit. In many countries, broadband speeds are so bad that games take hours to download. A lot of people may prefer walking over to a physical game retailer and picking up a little ROM cartridge with a full game on it.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
blu ray disc
Went to buy a vr headset for my PS4 and the sales people didn't know anything about them, couldn't tell me why there were 2 types, had no demo model to try. Those are literally the only reason why I went down there otherwise I would have bought online. So Train your employees, have demo models, or I will just buy online because I might as well not leave the house.
Reselling games at retail is a tricky business to be in. Digital distribution has obviously been the future for more than a decade (almost two at this point). Game vendors would much rather sell direct rather than minting disks.
Disks aren't even games. They're a proof of ownership token with a content cache that's usually mostly out of date before the game's official launch.
Profit margins are razor thin and game vendors would rather sell direct anyway.
As a result, Gamestop makes most of their money selling trinkets, toys, tshirts, services (dubious as they are), and reselling used kit. Ever been in one lately? They're like a boutique shop for *wretch* 'nerd' *gag* 'culture'. Games and hardware are just there to draw customers in.
Thinkgeek is the perfect buyer. They're in the same industry.
Usually those jobless user's PARENTS pay for the games... problem is, you can download games now for the same price that Game Stop charges, so you never need to leave your mom's basement!
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Actually having the disc don't mean shit anymore friend. I bought Kane & Lynch II (what can I say I enjoy "so bad its good" entertainment like "The Room" and it was only $4) brand new and when I put in the disc? All it did was call the Steam home page and give you the Steam Code for the game!
So yeah discs don't mean shit anymore, its one of the reasons why if there is a choice I use GOG as at least there I can just download the installer and keep it on a backup drive, as buying a box only to get a "disc" that just calls Steam is beyond pointless.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
I can't say I miss the days of shuffling through dozens of cases to find where the game you really want to play is. I get the arguments for having them, but for me the advantages of a downloaded game far exceed them. Especially as I share between my sons and my own xbox account, essentially cutting the cost of multiplayer games in half. Sure it's nice to be able to sell a bunch every now and then, but not worth the hassle for the most part.
Preparing to piss on their grave. GameStop can't die fast enough. They popularized game preorders -- which have skewed game development and marketing -- and retailer-specific content. They make it nearly impossible to walk in and buy a new game that you didn't preorder. They try to push warranties on solid-state Switch cartridges. Their treatment of employees is abysmal. Their prices for used games are usually far higher than what can be found on ebay or even Amazon. It's convenient to sell stuff to them, but that's the only upside I can give them.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Cheap 40G ROM chips are possible, although with current gaming standards, they'd have to be flash drives since there is no way to make a 40GB codebase without a ton of errors and issues.
The problem is not necessarily downloads (which are easier) but the fact that brick and mortar stores try to nickle and dime their customers to death. Blockbuster did not go out of business because of Netflix but because it costed $5 to rent a scratched up DVD for a week and $15 if you were late and that's how they paid their rent. Same problem with many other 'small business' stores, a bookstore is complaining about Amazon and Barnes & Noble, but has only ever opened 3 mornings and 2 full days from 9am-4pm with a 2 hour lunch break in the week, same goes for computer stores and many others, this used to work when you're the only game in town but when actual competition sets in, they whine and die.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
Many new laptops come without optical drives, nowadays. I was expecting PC games to be on blurays by now, but nope. Who wants to put their game on 3-5 DVDs? I'm getting Baldur's Gate flashbacks of the sleeve of 8-ish CDs. Nintendo claims that NAND chips are actually cheaper than dual-layer blurays, so games might come on a flash drive instead. Of course, that's more expensive than a slip of paper with a code, plus bandwidth, so guess which one publishers are going to prefer.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
Aside from their trade-in racket where people "sell" games to them, they're just another victim of the B&M vs Online bloodbath. Running a B&M costs money, employing staff costs money (useless or not), and without some kind of magic *thing* to draw people in and pay full retail, it seems like it would be almost impossible to compete with Amazon on just about anything but groceries.
You'll always have that outlier that insists on shopping local or B&M because they can't/won't use a credit card or other payment service online, but I think those numbers are always shrinking, so you're left with the impulse shopper, and that is pretty much it.
...I'd imagine any potential buyers are only offering them 2% of what they're actually worth?
+1 underrated. GameStop's downward slide has been depressing to watch, but every single time in the last 4 years that I've tried to prop them up with my own money, neither the staff on hand nor the stock room were prepared to do their part of the bargain. I really hate having to walk next door to Target or Best Buy. Why do they do a better job at actually stocking the games?
The ultimate irony will be when it hits "penny stock" status.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
Didn't someone find all the ET cartridges in a landfill a few years ago, that should net them gas money at least
I just can't help myself.
Why not just make USB sticks that contain the game files plus an installer that copies the lot to your HDD. USB sticks are cheap enough these days for that to be viable.
This is a prime example of why Gamestop is failing. Think about the stupidity of Gamestop to allow, here let me sell you a game and then go to my major competitor to actually get it, how bloody stupid can they be.
Obviously due to the nature of the company, those stores would be cheated of sales if they direct distribute online but they still needed to do the restructuring, to compete head on with steam, without killing their stores but failure to compete with steam, means those stores take gamestop down with them.
Here is how you do it, like the old milk companies, milkman got their routes and whether or not they sold on those routes was bound to sales efforts of the milk producer. So for Gamestop, online direct sales, go to the store catchment, and that store is prompted to promote Gamestop on a click and mortar basis, so they get a credit for all gamesales, whether direct or indirect in their catchment.
This allows Gamestop to kick Steam where it hurts, offering an extra service Steam do not, the pick up, not just for games but also for hardware. If they were really smart, that memory stick is not that bad an idea, sell a memory stick, pay for the memory stick and pay for the game, they are not that expensive now and you are not throwing it away, hell after you use it, you could go back to the store and download the game at the store of the servers in the back right to the memory stick you already OWN, ta dah, crap all over steams offering. Buy on line, go to store with memory stick and pick up the game off the stores servers.
Whilst there, they can try to sell hardware. Gamestop are failing because they did not work to compete with steam, just sort of hoped for the best. The need to work click and mortar properly and that means creating catchments for the stores for online direct game sales. Not when ever their clients have a problem they can go to the local stores, rather than being indifferently fobbed off like steam does. They are turning to shit, so now is the time for Gamestop to expand their offering.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
The same group of people that tanked RadioShack, Pier1, JCPenny, etc are the same people running GameStop, they move from one failure to another with the same old ideas.
So, since that time I have been (on and off) developing a free software and free culture multi-player online RPG called Wograld. Yes, the game industry is broken, but until we reform the business models, it will stay broken.
So, maybe people want the fancy box and disk, and cloth map and figure etc. But it might as well come with the complete game too on the disk and no DRM or just call STEAM stuff. (if its client server, it should come with some kind of use-able server too). So maybe game download = free Collector's Edition Box = $$$
They can trade it in for tree fiddy
Seriously. What IS the future of a place like GameStop?
More and more game vendors are moving to electronic distribution.
And you can basically buy the physical hardware ANYWHERE.
That's basically a knife in the heart for them.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
If the USB sticks are loaded in-store from a kiosk at purchase they could be loaded with whatever the latest patch is at that point.
it was only $4
That's why people still buy stuff in physical shops. Steam if the exception but most online shops don't do big discounts. Often they don't do discounts at all, still charging full price for four year old games.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Blockbuster!
>/dev/null 2>&1
Gamestop are failing because they did not work to compete with steam, just sort of hoped for the best.
Gamestop and GAME and EB Games and all the like are crap and make the experience of shopping in their store a painful one and they deserve a rude awakening, but I just can't abide people bringing up Steam as if it somehow took the legs out from under them. It's entirely a secondary market of a smaller niche compared to the Playstation/Switch/Xbox customers that buy/sell/resell physical goods and if it went away tomorrow Gamestop wouldn't suddenly jump back into the black. The PC master race has to demand better from their publishers instead of supporting shitty DRM and games-as-a-service practices and then maybe their platform will compete with the dominant consoles. Gamestop isn't really in a position where they can or even want to do that.
Cheap USB sticks are slow though. The last patch I installed was 4gig. It downloaded pretty quick because I have decent 200mbit/s, however if I had to copy that to a flash drive cheap enough to distribute en masse I'd expect it to be SLOWER than the download. I've had some god awful flash drives come across my desk and 1 hour to do 4 gig is far from the worst.
and picking up a little ROM cartridge with a full game on it.
Only to insert it into your console and have to download a 10GB "update" to say nothing of "don't forget the second half of the game is DLC" or the games which are episodic.
Welcome to the brave new world. Physical media means nothing and gains you nothing over the download these days.
I have the same problem. I live in a rural area and my internet is extremely slow. I purchased the last Battlefield game last year (maybe the year before?) and I still haven't played it because it wants to download 17GB of data and my internet connection won't stay up long enough for that to complete successfully.
I'm just wondering at what point do they crash and burn. Their model has become outdated and as customer for MANY years I've gotten to the point that I try not to to go there any more when I days past I was loyal to the point that I purposely tried to keep my business there. The changes to their reward system are terrible (and after YEARS of accumulating points they are no longer worth squat), I get tired of them trying to strong-arm me into buying used games when I want knew ones (to the point that I've could employees lying to me about availability) and ThinkGeek is an overpriced joke with retail stores literally charging more than online... and I can only use my rewards points for "gift cards" good in their RETAIL stores (used to be online too) which basically nullifies the points you just wasted. I feel like I earned nothing after spending thousands of dollars over the years while paying for a membership with them to do so. Oh yeah... they've accidentally cancelled my Game Informer subscription TWICE in the past two years (I had to call both times to get fixed and no one could tell me what happened - it was a "glitch" I was told both times... NOT an acceptable answer). I've been playing video games for about 38 years. I am a collector and will always have a love for them and I believe will be playing until I physically can't any more. This company has lost a long time customer and I'm sure I'm not the only one that feels this way. I am not surprised that their stock has dropped one bit and in their current state they are all but doomed. They are looking like the next Block Buster if you ask me.
I know most big companies keep track of you, but it was kinda eye opening in one of my visits.
I was asked to make a GameStop account, and refused (I don't go there enough to justify selling more of my private information). The person who rang up my credit told me "Hey, because you bought z, y, and z the last time you were in you could have have saved 10 bucks, I might just do that and take the money for you." It was kind of... refreshingly honest in a way? Seeing how the sausage is made is a phrase that comes to mind too.
That was the day I swore off GameStop forever.
Platform DRM doesn't have shit to do with it buddy, it has to do with the fact console owners? Kinda tarded. You can go to YouTube right now and see dozens of vids about how you can grab a $50 office box, slap in a 1030 or rx460 and voila! You'll have a system with better frame rates and cheaper games than any of the consoles but apparently "sticking a card in a slot is haaaard". I should know as IDK how many times I've been paid to literally do just that, take some office box they have and stuff a card into it.
But thanks to actual competition PC gamers have never had it so good, you have Steam and Epic and Origin and GOG and Humble Bundles and a bazillion other outlets so PC game prices drop like a stone compared to their console counterparts and unlike consoles PC games can be played online for free for decades (hell I can fire up Team Fortress Classic or AVP 2K and be playing a match in seconds and thanks to GOG Galaxy playing old games online has never been simpler) but sadly society has dumbed down to the point anything more complex than "stick disc in slot" is beyond a huge chunk of our population.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Actually the only reason I bought it (along with several other trashy titles) was they had a big tub in the middle of the store piled high with cheapo PC titles. This is a concept IDK why online retailers don't do, make a big bright "bargain bin" where they can just dump all kinds of titles for you to root through.
Sure Steam has a below $5 section but its hidden at the bottom and is filled with DLC to titles you don't own so completely pointless and a PITA whereas store like Wally World learned ages ago big fat bargain bins keep people in their store and while they are there you have a better chance of selling them other merch. If the online stores offered a more enjoyable bargain bin along with Humble Bundle type deals where you can get multiple titles for one price? I'd be a lot more likely to shop there, as it is now I rarely shop most online shops except to buy a single title I already want and that is it, no extras.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
First, let me say that I actually like Steam, and the only games I have that aren't purchased there are because the game isn't offered for sale on Steam, but on some companies own private Steam-like service (origin, u-play, epic, etc).
That said...If you think there is more competition for purchasing games for the PC than there was before, you need to take your blinders off. For example, you can ONLY buy most EA games on origin, period. A few more are only available on epic. A few more are only available on u-play. That's not competition. Not like being able to buy your game from Amazon, Target, Walmart, GameStop, or 50 other stores.
Personally, I find the convenience of having my steam library available to me at all times far outweighs the benefits of the physical media. I like being able to uninstall a game to free up space, then 6 months later being able to reinstall it for a quick game or two without having to try and find the physical media and hope it's still readable. Or find an external bluray/dvd player to hook up so I can reinstall it since my PC doesn't have one built-in.
See I'm the opposite. I find steam to be nothing but a huge pain in the ass. It's required internet, and having to log in, and when I want to play it denies me because it's updating. Or it's down for maintenance!
It's also terrible for LAN parties, or just friends coming over to hang and game. Sit down, enter name, and then play. I own most of my games, the ones that are steam are made to not use steam, and on launch ask for users name
With steam, each and every PC I own has to have a separate steam account, and use what ever name is associated with it. And each one need not purchase a copy of game even if it wont be used. Who wants to maintain multiple steam accounts!?
Doesn't work for my kids either.
It also doesn't work with how I admin my boxes, where on reinstall I copy over 100's of gigs of games that don't need to be re-installed. Only need the DX, MS VC++ redistributes and done. It would take 100's of hours to install.
It breaks my rules,
1. Nothing runs in background when not playing the game. (no chat, updating, or anticheat)
2. When I want to play it, nothing will block me.
3. It doesn't require internet unless I'm playing with people across the internet.
4. I can play game without having to install it after reinstalling OS, etc.
5. I can specify where it installed and it doesnt hide files(like save games not in my documents/my games)
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
It's Gamestop. They'll buy an Xbox One and a bunch of games for under $50. $300 for the company seems fair.
Different priorities for different people.
I'm not sure on the multiple steam accounts thing. I only game on 1 PC that is built for gaming.
As for the most of your rules, as far as I can see, steam doesn't break most of them. You can move games from one machine to another without reinstalling them, I've done it many times.
1. Nothing runs in the background when not playing the game. True, but half the time I have voice chats open while playing games, so I don't see much point in this and haven't cared in 10 years. The background processes are so minor it doesn't matter to me.
2. I don't think I've ever been blocked by steam from playing any of my games. Of course, this is just my experience, yours might be different.
3. Doesn't require internet. Steam doesn't require internet either. You can play in offline mode, but you need to periodically go back online and I'm not sure what the frequency is... a week I thought. Not a concern for me since I always play online anyhow, and I have my games set to auto-update automatically and limit it's bandwidth usage so no one in the house can even tell when it's updating.
4. I can play a game without having to install it after reinstalling OS. You don't have to reinstall steam games either. It's pretty simple to move them to another machine (or drive).
5. I can specify where it is installed and it doesn't hide files. You can specify where the games are installed, I typically choose C:\games, but they are then put into c:\games\steam\steamapps\common and all the games I install are there, unless I had a second drive, and then you can choose to install some of them there as well. I've done that in the past when I had a small OS drive and a large spinny disk. Now I just keep everything on my 1TB SSD, and I uninstall what I don't need. If I want the game back, I click install and it'll be on my machine in less than 10 minutes (for large games). Most games download and install in a couple minutes.
Not disagreeing with you, but my experiences are apparently very different, and my needs/wants are very different, so steam works great for me.
2. Steam blocked me all the time via forced upgrading when I go to play it. The way around this is to have steam running all the time and auto updating....
3. To install the games, to which I have a cd/dvd, required internet. Each time I tried to play the game, it required steam running and for me to log in. I never saw a way around that through the interface. Maybe if I disabled my network? easier to avoid steam or just use cracks.
4. on new system, I had to re-install steam, told it of the game location and what not, and it re-installed the over 5g game. So yea, couldn't play that day.
5. it hides saved files under hidden system folders under your profile Roaming or some such. So backing up your stuff and reinstalling OS, that stuff gets left behind.
My uses are way different than yours. I prefer to play games with friends while gaming out with them. I also have kids that I play games with.
Think of this, lets say I have my steam account, set to auto login for all my machines, but my kids use those machines, wouldn't they have access to do more than just play the games, like buy games? also my password is now for them to find.
The spirit of resistance to government is so valuable on certain occasions that I wish it to be always kept alive
2. Yeah, that is probably why I never get blocked since I always have it running on my gaming machine and set to auto update.
3. If you are installing a game from CD/DVD, then you don't need internet (not sure why you are using steam for this except for maybe a consistent interface?). You install as normal, then you can add a shortcut to the game in steam so that it shows up in your library. I had notepad set up as a "game" at one time this way. As for "offline" mode, it's the first menu option "Steam", and the second option under that "Go offline...".
4. Not sure why this happened to you, as I've moved steam libraries many, many times and they were 500GB+, and I would have noticed it redownloading them.
5. Yeah, depending on the game, it might put your saved files there, but that is game dependent, just like the non-steam versions. I always back up my profile anyhow though. I like having my photos, shortcuts, favorates, etc moved with me to a new machine. Not that many would, but you can also have your profile roam with you (not really easy to set up, but doable), so that every machine you have then has your saved games, so you can play the game on any machine you want. Again, sort of neat.
Yes, your use cases are much different. About 20% of my gaming time is with others, and they are remote from me. I have a group of friends I've been playing with for 15+ years, and not a single one of us still lives in the same state anymore.
As for your kids being able to play on steam, yes, if they use the same windows login as you, then they could access your games. Still couldn't buy games though, as that would require your credit card info or paypal password to actually buy it. Although, not so sure on the in-game stuff as I don't have any games with in-game purchases. It's usually a DLC/Add-on, that that is actually done outside of the game itself, so you can't buy anything without your credit card information or paypal password. Unless you save your credit card info in steam, and even then they need to know your CVV I believe.