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GameStop appoints chief technology officer and two additional executive hires
- dgritsko 6y agoIs this the first actual corporate news from GameStop itself during the frenzy of the last several weeks? I'd love to have been a fly on the wall in one of their boardrooms during the maelstrom, when they were a front page story for basically every news site on the planet.
- nairboon 6y agoYes that is the first news since Ryan Cohen joined the board in mid January.
- newbie578 6y agoYes, that is why I shared it. It is the first times we heard anything from them since this frenzy began.
- JohnJamesRambo 6y agoI mean they probably weren’t doing anything except rapidly trying to sell their stock options that had 100x’d. They more than anyone knew they weren’t worth $325 a piece.
- ordinaryradical 6y agoSales from officers have to be scheduled in advance precisely to prevent that kind of behavior.
- nrmitchi 6y agoI mean, they have to be scheduled in advance to avoid even the implication of trading based on non-public information. I would find it hard to believe an accusation of "insider trading" if an GameStop officer sold a bunch of stock last week, rather than the much more likely public-information explanation of "we're definitely not a $25B company and everyone knows it".
- Vvector 6y agoScheduled sales are not required, only recommended. If an unscheduled sale is made, there might be insider trading issues, and might trigger an investigation. That said, it would be easy to argue the sale was due to public information, i.e. the stock going up 100x in 6 months. See Rule 10b5-1
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- totalZero 6y agoThey also released this very important news on 28 Jan: https://news.gamestop.com/news-releases/news-release-details/gamestop-earns-top-marks-human-rights-campaigns-2021-corporate https://news.gamestop.com/news-releases/news-release-details... I share your sentiments.
- pratik661 6y agoI was wondering if GameStop would use their once in a lifetime overpriced valuation to raise money to invest in a game streaming platform (ie Netflix for games).
- volgar1x 6y agoIsn't current market already saturated and kind of underperforming commercially ?
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- dogshoes 6y agoThey do (or did) own Spawn Labs, which was a cloud streaming device for game consoles around 2010-2014. It no longer exists, but they likely still retain IP in this realm.
- tachyonbeam 6y agoIt seems to me all the streaming gaming services so far have been a flop. In order for it to work, we need really high bandwidth, reliable internet connections and low latency. The technology maybe isn't quite ready still, because we haven't really been focused on the reliability of internet connections and wifi, just more peak download speed. Streaming gaming sounds sexy, but IMO, it's probably bound to keep being a flop for the next 5-10 years. Not something I would invest in.
- languagehacker 6y agoNo big surprise that one of the new executives is coming from Chewy, given Ryan Cohen.
- valuearb 6y agoChewy is an entirely different business model with little applicability to GameStop. You can’t download cat food and your console doesn’t die if you don’t buy it a physical game every single month.
- kin 6y agoYou're not wrong, but don't forget that there are plenty of physical goods in gaming. Every nerdy IP has merchandise and that's why GameStop acquired ThinkGeek. There are tons of nerdy merchandise and collectibles to sell. Instead of massive clearances on items that don't sell, they could offer subscriptions services like LootCrate and when you get there you're not too far off from monthly cat food.
- valuearb 6y agoAnd if they pull it off, they’d be worth $50 a share. That’s what DFV said himself.
- SpicyLemonZest 6y agoI’m still not exactly optimistic for their chances, but I guess Netflix does show these kinds of tech pivots can work. It’ll be interesting to see how this plays out.
- ekanes 6y agoYes, but Netflix famously saw their pivot coming from the very start. They didn't name the company MoviesByMail.com -- they named the company for the future wave they intended to hit.
- sjg007 6y agoGameStop clearly has brand recognition and games are increasingly social experiences. So that is where you pivot.
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- theorymeltfool 6y agoI'm curious if the HFs that shorted Gamestop, are also profiting off of the wild swings by Redditors who have now lost hundreds of thousands of dollars. They could easily swing-trade this stock all the way down, using massive buy/sell orders to drive the price. If Melvin Capital isn't bankrupt after all of this, there might just be A LOT of broke redditors who cashed in their lifesavings on this gamble.
- volta83 6y agoI see often stated as a fact that "a lot of retail investors from WSB bough a lot of GME shares", but I never see any proof about any of this. What's the proof that any retail investor actually bought GME? How many retail investors actually bought GME? How much money did they win or loose?
- rsstack 6y agoIt's a public community. Did you open it even once? People (yes, people other than the one guy who started it) post screenshots from their investment accounts.
- Rebelgecko 6y agoI wonder how many are authentic and not just inspect element
- rsstack 6y agoEveryone on the Internet is a bot. I'm waiting for you to post "your" YouTube channel and ask for likes.
- thatguy0900 6y agoWhy do you not believe people didn't jump on the free money hype train? It's not like redditors havent gathered together to do stupider things before. The fact that almost every easy to use trading app had to limit buys on gme specifically should tell you that it was not a small thing.
- valuearb 6y agoDFV himself said that GME might be worth $50 a share if, and only if, the Cohen turnaround eventually takes.
- dehrmann 6y agoI wouldn't put too much faith in what he says. Seems like if you see something you think is worth $50 per share selling for $300 in a short squeeze scenario, you should sell. This morning, I read that he failed to realize more than $10M of paper gains. Ok, maybe you're in it for the long run, but it clearly wasn't worth $300. Cash out, buy back in a month when things settle down. Then again, he's been so public with this that if he were to sell and ghost WSB and Youtube, he might legitimately fear for his life for the next decade. Maybe there's something to be said for traders not telegraphing every trade.
- valuearb 6y agoYour theory makes sense. He was actually down something like $30M from his peak at end of day yesterday. He’s cashed out $13M and had like $10M left.
- criddell 6y agoWhat is GameStop going to be five years from now when digital distribution is the only way video games are sold? I can't imagine selling game-related tchotchkes is a very good business. What else is there?
- newsclues 6y agoCommunity, through competition.
- iso1631 6y agoRebuilding into a place for gamers to congregate in person rather than shout at anonymous trolls on the internet? They've got the space, and after 18 months of limited social contact it could be an opportunity
- musingsole 6y agoI share your thoughts but then thinking more on it made me realize how drastically different that business model would have to be. Retail is all about getting a customer to that cash register and then out the door with a decent chance of coming again for something similar. A hangout spot...a Gamestop-branded Dave and Busters or other video game lounge makes a lot of sense if you have the space. But the business reasoning is backwards: get people in and get them in a mood where they'll buy trickle-goods like food/drink, time on a given display...And all the while you suddenly have to contend with the culture of your patrons a lot more...directly. A snotty kid being brat in your store eventually leaves and is forgotten. In this new model, that kid wants to stay in your store a lot longer and worse will try to interact with the other patrons (that being the point of your store, after all).
- iso1631 6y agoWhen you have real disruption, which distributing games/videos/whatever online is, you have to either close or pull a hailmary. Steam and Epic were able to leverage their catalogue, and got moving early on. Moving into an online game platform would be far more of a than building a hangout. > And all the while you suddenly have to contend with the culture of your patrons a lot more You do, but Gamestop don't have much choice, they're in a dying market that's been disrupted. Local boardgame shops and bookshops near me have managed to survive by moving into this type of business.
- Corrado 6y agoI was thinking recently about how GameStop might pivot. They have retail locations, which a lot of companies don't, so they should take advantage of that. Some examples I have thought of include: * put 3D printers in the stores and sell custom objects based off of your gamer profile. * convert the stores into a gamer bar and show eSports tournaments. * host LAN parties or move into tabletop games
- musingsole 6y agoYour 1st and 3rd idea, maybe, but they'd be moving into a territory filled with competitors. It's hard to imagine my local tabletop tavern crowd migrating to a corporate equivalent. Gamestop pivoting to a gamer bar seems incredibly unlikely. Retail is not restaurants -- the business logic is all sorts of different -- and likely zoning issues would prevent many locations from suddenly becoming restaurants.
- llarsson 6y agoE-sport enthusiast are, as a group, sadly not very good patrons. They stay very long per visit and order very little food and drinks (relative to the extent of their stay). This is because many, if not most, if them will be teenagers or in their early twenties, and unruly enough to drive the more financially stable 30+ crowd away. So you will have all-night events showing StarCraft 2 or whatever, and only refill a bunch of drinks every once in a while. Very difficult to get a good business that way. Price sensitivity also plays a big part here. I've talked to several owners of failed e-sport restaurants. They all say the same thing. It's sad, but also the reason you don't see tons of them around, even if gaming as an industry makes billions of dollars.
- Corrado 6y agoMaybe this idea needs to mature a bit. I think eSports is going to be the future of sports in general. Normal "sports" bars do quite well (well, maybe not right now) and I expect eSports bars to follow suit. But who knows, maybe now is not the right time. Besides, most GameStop locations are pretty small and not really zoned for a bar. It was an interesting thought though.
- throwaway4good 6y agoFirst order of business for their new CTO - fix the website: Access Denied You don't have permission to access "http://www.gamestop.com/" on this server. Reference #18.8ba72917.1612368077.10f974bd
- throwaway4good 6y agoThis is from accessing https://gamestop.com https://gamestop.com right now ...
- ulucs 6y agoI think gamestop blocks visitors from abroad, I missed many glitch sales because of this.
- throwaway4good 6y agoGamestop is in Europe though. Seems more like a mistake than something deliberate.
- whalesalad 6y agoFooter still shows 2020 as a copyright date, too. Not that it really matters - but i've always thought it was kinda funny when people just don't use a static start year with a dynamic {{ now.year }} so it is always up-to-date.
- finnthehuman 6y agoThere is always the chance they considered automatically showing the current year, but counsel advised them against automatically applying a copyright date later than the last modification of the work.
- mdip 6y agoI was asked to modify an application to do just this for similar reasons. The issue was that the server was in UTC and someone had noticed that the copyright date was a year in the future on one of our web apps[0], which resulted in a help desk call on a holiday. It was unhelpful that the individual noticing the problem worked in legal. We weren't told "last modification of the work" but we were told we could not display a date in the future. I wouldn't be surprised if "last modification of the work" is the correct approach. [0] Someone didn't have a date for New Years' Eve, I guess.
- ctvo 6y ago> Mr. Francis brings more than two decades of experience in e-commerce and consumer technology to GameStop. Most recently, he was an Engineering Leader at Amazon Web Services. Checking LinkedIn Mr. Francis was at AWS for ~1 year working on DocumentDB, the MongoDB compatibility layer.
- littledot5566 6y agoThe devil is always in the details. Also, wouldn't it make more sense to poach from Valve or Epic?
- sjg007 6y agoThe guy is probably undervalued and his resume suggests he likes building things from scratch.
- tmotwu 6y agoWhy people are undermining the physical medium for video games? Comparing it to Netflix/Blockbuster? What? Stadia is currently on the verge of flopping and we're not even sure where other streaming services may go. Streaming video games are literally constrained by the laws of physics and the need for extremely responsive user input. It's exciting but it's also a whole different engineering problem than what Netflix solved in order to edge out their advantage over Blockbuster. Steam, the Playstation/Xbox Stores are the correct comparisons. That said, I doubt Gamestop has been struggling these last few years simply because there has been a movement towards digital downloads. People seem to forget that these digital stores have existed for the longest time and are not at all new innovation. Take a look at the sentiment towards digital only consoles - overwhelmingly negative. Newer AAA games require so much storage space that the progression of networking bandwidth aren't keeping up with the demands at all. I'm not going to speculate where GameStop is headed because they haven't announced those changes yet. However, the speculation of evaluating their future based on digital downloads or the Blockbuster story is absolutely foolish.
- Hamuko 6y agoThere's two big issues for GameStop: a) People are getting faster Internet connections, which enables them to actually utilise digital stores. The PlayStation Store is almost 15 years old and I can imagine how bad the average consumer connection was back then. And if you have a slower connection, you can still pre-order and pre-load games. b) Physical medium is not exclusive to brick and mortar. I am myself a collector of physical games (167 games in my shelf at the moment I believe) and I don't really go out and buy games. I just order them online. Basically, they're not only competing against the growing popularity of PlayStation Store, Xbox Live and Nintendo e-Shop, they're competing against Amazon.
- tmotwu 6y agoa) Preordering and preloading games from digital stores isn't a new thing either. Internet connections are improving but are they improving at the rate of how large AAA games are becoming? (A little anecdote, I recall downloading video games on Steam 10 years ago and it took me on average a few hours. Now in the present, newer games like RDR2 took me days.) For b), I'm with you. GameStop does have an e-commerce platform, so they're hardly exclusively brick and mortar. Walmart and Target hasn't disappeared because they're suddenly competing with Amazon. But cmon, there are highly upvoted posts in this thread speculating all video games are digital only within 5 years. Do you believe that?
- dehrmann 6y agoOne thing the short squeeze and all the coverage did was put Gamestop under a lot of scrutiny. I might have added some value just because now more people are paying attention to what they do.
- mcdramamean 6y agoGamestop needs to focus on having tons of e-sports tournaments (with a buy in and/or membership fee). Create an esports league and have national/regional/local tournaments. Also they need to be live streaming on twitch from each location. As a rule, from corporate down to the local shop, they should be creating online content about video games. They should leverage their position with Microsoft to see if they can work with Game companies to get secrets/easter eggs in games and then be the streamers that are known for revealing game secrets. Make it about the gamer experience. Once the pandemic lifts, having physical locals can be a great strength if used well. Do e-sport lessons. Have retro nights. Do arcade pop ups. They need to focus on branding/cool factor. Be a safe space for YOUNG kids. There is tons of stuff they can try besides inventing some tech platform.