For years now, there’ve been reports about GameStop saying that the retail gaming store might be on its way out, with sales continuing to drop as the industry moves more and more toward digital sales. Of course, the chain didn’t exactly earn much goodwill from customers when management decided that they were an essential business during the early stage of the current COVID-19 pandemic, doing everything in their power to prove that their stores should stay open.
Regardless, they still took a huge hit due to coronavirus and are now expecting to report heavy financial losses for Q1. Though the full financial results won’t be shared until June 9th, a preliminary report has shown that the company has lost around $162-$172 million. For comparison’s sake, Q1 2019 saw them make a profit of $6.8 million.
But COVID-19 hasn’t been all bad news for GameStop. In fact, they recently revealed that they experienced a staggering 1500% increase in online sales between March 1st and April 10th. Which is their best performance for March since 2008’s launch of the Nintendo Wii.
Obviously, GameStop is far from the only company who’s taken a hit during these difficult times, but clearly the pandemic has had a massive impact on their business, and Q2 may be rough as well. Though they had recently begun to reopen stores, with approximately 85% of their US locations and roughly 90% of the international stores open in some capacity by the end of last month, things have gotten bad once more.
Due to the protests in the United States, GameStop has now closed approximately 90 stores and 30 of those will apparently remain shut for the foreseeable future due to the damage. In other words, it’s going to be a while before the company is in smooth waters again and it’ll certainly be interesting to see how the next few months play out for them.
