Game Retailer GameStop Says It Can't Sell Itself, Sees Stock Drive 27 Percent (arstechnica.com) 104
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."
The stock drove 27 percent? (Score:2)
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Dumb af unless they're shorting their own stock (Score:2)
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."
Re:Dumb af unless they're shorting their own stock (Score:4, Interesting)
No not really.
The board had previously announced that it was seriously looking at private equity options and to change that without reason would cause serious questions in the boards judgement.
Announcing that the sale would not go ahead due to inability of a buyer to secure acceptable financing though is a genuine, rational reason not to proceed.
I also strongly suspect that a large part of the share price drop would be through speculators exiting the stock now that a sale is not happening. Looking at the historical share price it looks like the correction to ~$12 is very close the the june shareprice when the buyout noise started.
Bricks and Mortar Game Shops Would Sell More Goods (Score:5, Interesting)
blu ray disc (Score:2)
blu ray disc
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How quaint.
I don't think I've ever held software distributed on bluray. Anybody?
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That explains it, I'm not a console ghetto gamer.
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I don't think I've ever held software distributed on bluray. Anybody?
Um, every PS4 game since ever??
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I'm not sure I've ever seen a PS3 or PS4 in person, except maybe through a display window, at a distance. A guy in high school had a PS2 though, back in the day.
I have a couple of 32 and 64GB USB memory sticks from a couple years ago, but I hardly ever use them.
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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.
Re:Bricks and Mortar Game Shops Would Sell More Go (Score:4, Interesting)
+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?
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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 wi
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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 be
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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
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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,
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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 ye
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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
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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", a
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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.
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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 thei
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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Prospective Buyers actually make sense (Score:1)
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
Re:Prospective Buyers actually make sense (Score:5, Insightful)
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"Except there are plenty of games that are no longer manufactured."
Yes, but Gamestop stopped carrying old games. They only go back to PS2/Xbox/GC now. They dropped all the carts, all the 32 bit except Xbox, etc. That stuff used to get gamers in the door.
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The game manufactures DO NOT WANT anyone to resell used games, it cuts into their profit margins!
True for the most part. It also cuts into sony/nintendo/microsoft's profits too but Sony made fun of Microsoft's used game policy implying that they understand just how important it is to ongoing business and Nintendo hasn't been trying to stop it either even though they probably have big publishers trying to twist their arm too.
It's things like that that make me think this "everything is going digital" narrative is WAY overblown. The only significant switch to digital I see is buying online and getting it
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Thinkgeek is the perfect buyer. They're in the same industry.
ThinkGeek has been owned by GameStop since 2015.
Physical disks are a drag (Score:2)
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.
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An organized shelf is faster to find a game in, than waiting an hour for that game to download because you had to delete it to make room for something else.
Unzips Fly (Score:2)
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, b
Changing times (Score:2)
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
Given their appraisement of merchandise... (Score:1)
Irony (Score:2)
The ultimate irony will be when it hits "penny stock" status.
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Maybe they could do trade in value (Score:1)
Driving Miss Gamestop? (Score:1)
I just can't help myself.
I blame North Texas retail executives... (Score:2)
Do we need Game Boxes? No. Want them? Maybe (Score:1)
I'll take it off their hands (Score:3)
Et tu DLC and High Speed internet. (Score:2)
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.
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There is no future for GameStop, that's what they meant when they can't find a buyer. The company has been running on fumes for years. There's no value in anything they do. I'm surprised they've held on this long. Late 2017 had articles about them being doomed, and I'm honestly surprised they are still operating.
There's just no way they can pivot to doing anything else useful. The secondary market is effectively gone and if you have to download the game anyway, you might as well just pay for it online.
Going
I also remember ... (Score:1)
The next Block Buster ? (Score:1)
GameStop are crooks anyways (Score:1)
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 co
A fair offer (Score:2)
It's Gamestop. They'll buy an Xbox One and a bunch of games for under $50. $300 for the company seems fair.
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