GameStop to close up to 200 stores

(Image credit: GameStop)

During a Q2 earnings call, GameStop CFO James Bell announced that "We are on track to close between 180 and 200 underperforming stores globally by the end of this fiscal year."

The videogame retailer is in the middle of implementing what's being called a "reboot" and has so far involved shutting down ThinkGeek's online store, and laying off 170 employees, as well as several staff members of Game Informer, GameStop's in-house magazine.

Bell also mentioned during the earnings call that the majority of of GameStop stores worldwide are profitable, but said "we have a clear opportunity to improve our overall profitability by de-densifying our chain." And this year's closures won't be the last of them. He went on to say, "we are applying a more definitive, analytic approach, including profit levels and sales transferability, that we expect will yield a much larger tranche of closures over the coming 12 to 24 months."

This year GameStop posted a loss of $415.3 million.

Thanks, GamesIndustry.biz.

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.