Subject: Survival
I will be straight to the point.
It is not sustainable for GameStop to operate a money losing business. The mission is to operate hyper efficiently and profitably. Our expense structure must allow us to endure any adverse scenario. Whether it’s a difficult economy or revenue deceleration from shrinking software, we must be profitable. Our job is to make sure GameStop is here for decades to come. Extreme frugality is required. Every expense at the company must be scrutinized under a microscope and all waste eliminated. The company has no use for delegators and money wasters. I expect everyone to treat company money like their own and lead by example.
Prospering in retail means survival. If we survive, we stay in the game. Survival is avoiding the deadly sins that often lead retailers to self-destruct. This is usually a result of the following - buying bad inventory, using leverage, and running expenses too high. By avoiding these self-inflicted mistakes and focusing on the basics, GameStop can be here for a long time.
I expect everyone to roll up their sleeves and work hard. I’m not getting paid, so I’m either going down with the ship or turning the company around. I much prefer the latter.
It won’t be easy. Best of luck to us all.
Ryan
I think that’s a bit premature.
While I’m sad that they shut down all the shareholder requests for an NFT dividend (for now), I still think the need filled by NFTs in gaming is undeniable in the long term, so I’m not ready to call the NFT marketplace dead yet. I imagine it would be pretty awesome if you were browsing in your local physical GS and could see and buy in-game assets right there in-store!
I simply don’t see it. Not for this use-case anyway. The Diablo 3 auction house was a disaster (I know it’s not NFTs, but it comes down to the same thing as far as game economies are concerned, it “just being cosmetic” doesn’t change anything there). Game developers have zero incentive to implement NFT cosmetics, because they can make way more money without them being NFTs and already are. The NFT concept itself is polluted and poisoned with scam after scam after scam. Every major publisher and developer received massive backlash to any implementation of it.
I only see it as a possibility for owning your video game license digitally and decentralized with the potential for reselling your games and baked in profit sharing for the original issuer. That’s literally the only real possible and viable use case in gaming. It would also be able to replace invasive and performance hampering DRM. Simply check against a wallet if the NFT is present. If it isn’t, you’re done. But even here, developers and publishers have almost no incentive to implement this. Why only get a cut, when you can always get full price (minus marketplace costs) from each customer?
Honestly, I’m glad that they sort of pulled the plug on the wallet and everything. Not because I don’t want that part to succeed, but because it shows there isn’t the specter of sunk-cost fallacy haunting the C-Level of GameStop anymore. They tried, it didn’t yield the expected results and won’t for a while longer, they’re focusing on other things.
I don’t doubt that eventually, there will be some decent games that have some sort of NFT implementation that doesn’t look and plays like a shabby asset flip, but it’s simply not a horse that’s been born yet to bet on.