I 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).
When 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.
* CEO gets a golden parachute and finds a new job. A competent CEO will always find a job. A turn-around is risky, and a failed turn-around will have exposes and will ruin a career. Easier to stay-the-course.
* Workforce is laid off, struggles for a few weeks, and usually finds new jobs. The layoff sucks, but turn-arounds involve equal layoffs (and indeed can be harder to find jobs after; my employer went out-of-business is a mighty good reason to leave a company). Employees also hate change; in many cases, finding new jobs like old jobs is easier than re-qualifying.
* Shareholders lose a little bit of money, but are pretty diversified, and from a 50 trillion market, GME even at its inflated valuation is around 1/20th of a percent.
... and new ventures come in and fill the gap.
Capitalism is built on survival-of-the-fittest. If a company is not fit, it's sometimes more humane to kill it and replace it with a fitter company than to keep it straggling along. Companies aren't people; they're abstractions. There's no moral remorse to replacing a company with a better one. If you're running DBCorp which has a mediocre, buggy product, and a mismanaged workforce, and I run DBInc which takes your customers, hires your workforce, and has a high-quality product and well-managed workforce, in the end, everyone often ends up happier.
If your goal is to keep the company going, you have to adapt to survive. Yes it's tricky, and you can simply jump off the bridge if you want, or you can actually try.
Vultures might want to pick the bones, and many owners might not care, but some do.
Of course if you think it's hard you're free not to bother.
GameStop was started as a side gig by Riggio, who was also the founder of Barnes and Noble. He has bigger things to worry about, like his retirement. It's been run by professional executives for the most part.
DeMatteo is still around, but I think that's it for the founding team. If you can call a series of merges a founding.
Yeah, if I own a company, I'll sweat and bleed to make it successful. That's the #1 founder / startup advantage.
That's not true for publicly-traded companies. Those are an abstraction. If a CEO is making $35 mil and someone offers them $50 mil, guess where they're going?
A lot of startups don't realize that as a source of advantage, but it's a big one. It's a lot of where the agility comes from too. A professional CEO need to first worry about keeping their job, then about their next job, and finally, the organization. For a founder, for the most part, those are one and the same.
If you gave me a failing public business as an owner -- with no accountability, no board to please, no existing executive team to back stab me, and all the upside -- I'd do better than most CEOs in turning it around. That's not because I'm more qualified or competent, but because I'd have the freedom of being an owner. The original CEO, if properly incentived, would usually do a better job than I would, in turn.
That sounds like the LAN Cafes (AKA "PC Bangs" in Korean) of old. They were at their peak pre-broadband, but as far as I can tell, have long since fallen out of favor.
Every now and then I see a new one pop up - usually focused more on consoles rather than PC games, but they seem to inevitably go out of business.
Yes, you'd probably find ones that might be able to work locally with the right community in the right location with low enough overheads to give it a punt to build it into a "destination" style place, in the same way some bookshops. You could try things like expanding into helping people writing their own games etc. Basically you'd be trying to serve the community.
It's not going to be an easy option, but it's pretty much the only option other than winding up the company.
Gamestop locations are tiny. They'd need to quadruple all of their store sqft at minimum to do any type of LAN party setup. In addition to all the money required to wire that up and the PC hardware required.
They've got the space, and after 18 months of limited social contact it could be an opportunity