The real answer is that any industry can die, and the best way to avoid that is to look carefully at your business model before you commit to building a company

The real answer is that any industry can die, and the best way to avoid that is to look carefully at your business model before you commit to building a company. No one can see the future well enough to tell exactly what will happen in an industry, but you can make a guess. In the case of Gamestop, their business opportunity began with the rise of home gaming consoles and PCs, and when you build a business around the side effect of a disruptive or rapidly changing technology, you have to have an exit strategy or be ready to change dramatically with the tech. Gamestop seems to have assumed that their business model would work forever without significant changes (I don't mean process or sales changes, I mean changing from something other than selling physical game media in physical stores). The writing has been on the wall for them for years as the Internet has grown, the size of software programs has grown, the ability of disposable media to hold the software has fallen. To give you an example of a similarly volatile business to be in, how about tax preparation? If you build a business based on that, you'll be ok as long as tax forms in the US are hard to fill out and the government doesn't change that fact. You might even make a whole career and life out of doing people's taxes. But, you can't lose sight of the fact that the whole thing may evaporate overnight if the bribes you're paying no longer stop the government from fixing the tax code, and if you don't have a plan for when that happens, you go hungry.