Six and a half years ago—after a failed corporate sale attempt, massive financial losses, and the departure/layoff of many key staff—I wrote about what seemed at the time like the “imminent demise” of GameStop. Now, after five years of meme stock mania that helped prop up the company’s finances a bit, I’ll admit the video game and Funko Pop retailer has lasted much longer as a relevant entity than I anticipated.
GameStop’s surprisingly extended run may be coming to an end, though, with Polygon reporting late last week that GameStop has abruptly shut down 400 stores across the US, with even more closures expected before the end of the month. That comes on top of 590 US stores that were shuttered in fiscal 2024 (which ended in January 2025) and stated plans to close hundreds of remaining international stores across Canada, Australia, and Europe in the coming months, per SEC filings.
GameStop still had just over 3,200 stores worldwide as of February 1, 2025, so even hundreds of new and planned store closures don’t literally mean the immediate end of the company as a going concern. But when you consider that there were still nearly 6,000 GameStop locations worldwide as of 2019—nearly 4,000 of which were in the US—the long-term trend is clear.
The ghost of Tower Records appears in a vision
The reason for that downward trend has been equally clear for years now: downloadable games. We made note back in 2017 when more than half of Destiny 2’s game sales came via download rather than disc, and things have only accelerated from there. Physical game sales now represent just 3 percent of overall PlayStation revenue, for instance, compared to 20 percent for digital full-game software sales, 17 percent for subscription-based “network services” like PlayStation Plus, and 29 percent for digital “add-on content” like DLC. Some major games are skipping physical releases altogether these days, while Nintendo is selling data-free Switch 2 Game Key Cards that merely act as a key for a downloadable copy of the game.
