Lots of people have predicted the death of retail gaming stores. Some have even predicted the death of consoles and the emergence of a predominant cloud gaming audience. So it may come to those people as no surprise that GameStop announced it had suffered a $624 million net loss in revenue at the end of this most recent quarter.
Still, GameStop claims they still exceeded expectations (kind of sad when you are expecting to lose even more) and placed at least some of the blame on the trends of the games industry itself, saying it’s currently a tough market. They claimed the reason sales were down on new software, used software and new hardware was because of the lengthened life cycle of current gen consoles. But interestingly, GameStop’s digital category had a 31.8% increase. Maybe that should tell them something?
Either way, they seem to be optimistic. Paul Raines, chief executive officer, stated, “Diligent operational efforts in a tough video game market as well as continued margin expansion of 200 basis points resulted in third quarter earnings exceeding expectations. We are now focused on delivering a successful holiday quarter driven by great titles, an unrivaled loyalty program, exciting new businesses and the Wii U launch.
What do you think? Is it only a matter of time for GameStop to fall, or will they manage to hang on in some form or another?
Source: GII
