Obituary of a video game store game stop I wrote, rewrote, and wrote again. Hundreds of stores closed. By 2023, digital sales accounted for more than 75% of global video game revenues. Consoles began shipping without disk drives. The eulogy actually wrote itself. GameStop was a relic, a mall dinosaur, and a business model that the Internet quietly made obsolete.
Last Sunday, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen offered to acquire eBay for $56 billion.
meme stocks that never die
Before we get into what that bid actually means, it's worth remembering how we got here. In January 2021, a loosely organized group of retail investors on Reddit's WallStreetBets forum discovered that GameStop (then trading at around $4 per share) was one of the most heavily shorted stocks on the market. Professional traders had high hopes for that failure. What followed was one of the strangest moments in modern financial history. GameStop's stock price soared more than 1,000% in two weeks, short-sellers lost billions of dollars, and the video game retailer that had been in the red for some time became the most talked-about company on the planet. In the meme stock era, we had mascots.
Cohen, who grew Chewy into a billion-dollar pet supplies company, has been quietly accumulating GameStop stock throughout 2020. He took over as CEO in 2023 and did something unexpected over the next two years. Instead of chasing digital transformation or pivoting to streaming, he leaned into the collection economy. GameStop has begun stocking Pokémon TCGs, trading cards, and retro hardware. Hundreds of underperforming venues were closed. The cash pile grew. Cohen was playing a longer game than anyone could have guessed.
The $56 billion question
This leads to the eBay bid announced on Sunday and described by Cohen as a path to creating a “legitimate competitor to Amazon.” On paper, the calculations are bold. GameStop is valued at about $11 billion and is looking to acquire a company four times its size. Cohen received $9 billion in cash and a $20 billion commitment from TD Bank, but still left a significant gap. When pressed about the funding on CNBC, Cohen responded, “I don't understand your question.” Wall Street is skeptical. eBay's board confirmed there were no prior discussions with GameStop before receiving the offer.
But strip away the financial engineering and you're left with something more interesting than the M&A story. The $56 billion argument is that physical, used and collectible commerce isn't dead, it's the future.
GameStop's promotion on eBay isn't random. eBay is the world's largest peer-to-peer marketplace for exactly what GameStop has focused on for three years: retro games, trading cards, collectibles, and used hardware. Cohen sees GameStop's remaining 1,600 U.S. stores not as debt but as authentication centers, drop-off points and live commerce hubs for eBay inventory. Duplication is not imaginable and already exists in the gaming community.
blind spot
This is the part that the article writers missed. While major publishers chase digital storefronts and subscription services, the secondary market for physical games has quietly grown. The global retro gaming market reached $3.8 billion in 2025 and is expected to reach $4.18 billion this year. This represents a 10% annual growth rate, which is approximately twice the growth rate of the overall console market. Retro console sales increased 32% in the first half of 2025 compared to all of 2024. Despite years of predictions that hardware-based gaming was dead, Switch 2 physical cartridges are selling strongly. The Pokemon TCG market continues to print money. Physical copies of GTA 6 are expected to sell for $80 at launch. The collector economy is no longer a niche market. What mainstream talk of “digital murder” almost completely ignores is the multibillion-dollar nature of the gaming industry.
GameStop saw it. Cohen bet on it. And now he wants to buy the largest single market whose economy already exists.
Whether or not the eBay deal ends is pretty much beside the point. Cohen could leave tomorrow and the bid would still have made a statement. Stores that were expected to fail took a look at one of the Internet's oldest marketplaces, decided it was undervalued, and made one of the largest unwanted retail takeover attempts in recent memory. That's not the action of a company that believes physical media is dead. That's the behavior of a company that thinks everyone else is wrong about what comes next.
GameStop has always been better at surviving than any rights. This might be the most GameStop thing we've ever done.
