It’s been pretty clear over the last 10 years that physical gaming retail stores have been struggling to cope with the market shift to other platforms. With websites such as Amazon able to undercut them on price and digital downloads able to beat them on convenience, they are businesses that have coasted for far too long. Specifically, being overly reliant on the 2nd-hand gaming market to keep things ticking over. It is, however, no small exaggeration to say that GameStop (one of America’s biggest video game retailers) is really struggling at the moment.
Having already announced at least two rounds of redundancies this year, a report via Kotaku has now confirmed that yet another 100 staff members (primarily in office-based environments) have been terminated.
GameStop Axes Another 100 Jobs
Until very recently, most of the job terminations have been at a store level. Largely as they look to get older store managers off their books and newer ones in at lower wages. Recent developments, however, have seen this shift rather significantly. Suddenly people who were (practically) being paid to find staff members to sack (often for very tenuous reasons) were finding themselves at the end of a “hey, can we have a quick chat?” conversation.
The latest terminations do appear to be strictly at an administration level within their main offices. It has, however, been confirmed that at least 50 of the staff terminations have been made at their ‘Game Informer’ media off-shoot.
Are They On The Verge of Collapse?
The short answer would appear to be a very resounding yes! As you can see above, the share price for the company has dropped from around $17 to around $3 in just one year. The downwards angle of that graph alone gives you a strong indication as to how badly the company is currently performing!
Quite frankly, it’s collapse doesn’t just seem likely, it seems inevitable!
What Do We Think?
GameStop does have a pretty lousy reputation. Both with how it treats its staff and it’s customers via store policies. We should, however, note that we were aware of this possibility many days ago. YouTuber, Camelot331 (a former Store Manager for GameStop) has long been speaking out against the companies practices since his own untimely departure. He did even actually predict that these cuts would happen 4 days ago. So credit where it is due, the guy knows his stuff and even he believes that the writing is on the wall for GameStop here!
Put simply, if things continue the way they are, it’s hard to imagine that GameStop will still be trading by the end of the year. At least, certainly not under its current form. While some might say good riddance, don’t forget that there are a lot of peoples jobs on the line here.
Hopefully, they can fix this, but if I was working for them… I think I’d start getting my exit strategy in place pretty sharpish! This could end, quite literally, at any moment!
What do you think? – Let us know in the comments!
