At the peak of the "hold" meme the one near me closed for renovations with signs in the window promising of an amazing new Gamestop concept... but it never arrived and now the Gamestop signs are gone too and replaced with real-estate signs asking for tenders.
Short of doing something like offering gaming PCs and consoles for rent (and maybe having some partnership with eg. Steam that would let people rent games to play on those gaming PCs/consoles) and maybe focusing on tabletop and LAN gaming, I'm not sure there's much they can do to keep themselves alive. And if they did that they would be totally at the mercy of the online distributors to maintain those partnerships.
It's not even that they missed it - they actively chose not to do it. Years back, Stardock made their own online distribution platform (called Impulse) that they slowly started expanding which might have become a Steam competitor in time. Gamestop bought it from them in 2011. And then did absolutely nothing with it, before closing it down a few years later.
At the peak of the "hold" meme the one near me closed for renovations with signs in the window promising of an amazing new Gamestop concept... but it never arrived and now the Gamestop signs are gone too and replaced with real-estate signs asking for tenders.
Short of doing something like offering gaming PCs and consoles for rent (and maybe having some partnership with eg. Steam that would let people rent games to play on those gaming PCs/consoles) and maybe focusing on tabletop and LAN gaming, I'm not sure there's much they can do to keep themselves alive. And if they did that they would be totally at the mercy of the online distributors to maintain those partnerships.
Same as Blockbuster missed the opportunity to be Netflix, gamestop missed the opportunity to be Steam, Epic etc.
It's not even that they missed it - they actively chose not to do it. Years back, Stardock made their own online distribution platform (called Impulse) that they slowly started expanding which might have become a Steam competitor in time. Gamestop bought it from them in 2011. And then did absolutely nothing with it, before closing it down a few years later.