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View submission: Keith Gill (u/DeepFuckingValue) and The Gamestop Saga
Instead of going the "Blockbuster" path, Gamestop is going the "Sears" path.
Blockbuster went bankrupt and closed all their locations seemingly overnight, because it allowed them to break all their leases. Other businesses were forced to eat the cost of those losses, so it made sense for them to do this.
Sears phased out very slowly over the course of several decades. They didn't have to break any leases and everyone got paid, but all the investors lost all their money eventually. The big winners of this path were the Sears executives who collected a lifetime of millionaire salaries and bonuses as they road the corpse into the ground.
Gamestop executives are just collecting the stock investments of Redditors and paying themselves with it. They will do this until all the money is gone, and then Gamestop will die, probably decades from now.
Gamestop can still bring in plenty of income over these decades (like Sears.) But it will never bring in more money tomorrow than it did yesterday. Gamestop has no path to resurrecting the used-games-retail industry, and their backup plans, like their NFT store, are even worse.
There's nothing here!