Oh goodie, here come the ‘people laughed at the internet’ survivorship-bias defenses, citing exceptions like their thing’s gotta be one.

Steve Jobs fell ass-backwards into a billion dollars, several times over. He thought the Apple II would be an appliance and PHP would replace Flash. There is no such reality-distorting messianic figure for Gamestop. It’s a brick-and-mortar video game store, in an era where consoles may not even support physical media, and the PC market is almost entirely digital. They were never special. They were already the merger of several other generic consumer-electronics chains, and the ones that weren’t absorbed have all died off.

Y’all managed to throw them an obscene amount of money, for deeply questionable reasons, and they still hit this death spiral. You already did the most you could possibly do, to help them, and it did not work. It is not going to get better. Their entire business model is kinda fucked. Several obvious directions they could go are similarly fucked. Best Buy’s not even selling movies, any more.

Honestly, at the height of their relevance, Gamestop’s reputation was a sleazy pawn shop for used titles. They got rich buying bare-disc games for $3, total, and selling them for $3 less than a new copy. As digital distribution made that irrelevant slash impossible, they got into toys and collectables, putting them in direct competition with music stores and novelty shops.

Apple survived because Microsoft needed a competitor to avoid getting shattered as a monopoly. Apple took off because Jobs was a marketing-centric bastard who could sell the worst mouse ever designed by making it translucent. Apple exploded because they were the first company stubborn enough to strongarm AT&T into supporting a smartphone without carrier-dictated software. And oh yeah, because their fancy new smartphone didn’t fucking do anything, for an entire year, until they announced a proudly-censored monopoly software store that demanded 30% of all money spent on or in any iPhone application.

Gamestop survived because of whatever the hell you’d like to say happened in 2020. They have not taken off. They’ve cratered. Their prospects are miserable. I cannot even guess what you expect they’ll do. I genuinely hope you have a more substantial expectation than ‘they’ll turn around! :)’ because by itself that means literally nothing. But I’m not optimistic about that hope panning out. Concrete predictions would mean the possibility of being dead wrong, at some point in the near future, and it seems evident nobody got here through realistic expectations and reassuring milestones.