What used to be the ultimate place for gamers everywhere has now taken a turn for the worse as GameStop announces that they will be closing down some of its stores. This shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise however as the company has had a bit of a bad time within the last year or so.
Starting off back in October, the company announced that they had a total global sales figure of $1.96 billion. While this may sound like a huge number, it is actually 2.8% worse than what they did the year prior.
In GameStops fourth quarter earnings in 2016, they actually took a hit and were down nearly 14% from the years prior. This also affected the companies stocks as they took huge dive down by 31%. The reason for the decline in sales can be attributed to weak new game sales as well as people not purchasing new consoles. As GameStop put it, “aggressive console promotions by other retailers on Thanksgiving Day and Black Friday [and] weak sales of certain AAA titles”. This doesn’t exactly come as a huge shock as Amazon has begun to offer pre order discounts to Amazon Prime Members.
What people do have to remember is that GameStop operates all over the world and has somewhere near 6,600 stores. So when you really think about it, the stores being shut down only make up a tiny percentage of their locations. But even though the number is small now, if they are unable to get back on track they will continue to struggle and potentially lose more stores later down the line.