 GameStop might be saved. But actually, seriously, GameStop has been in danger for a number of years. You pay attention to the news cycle last year, it has not gone well for the company. Well, out of this is because the advent of digital, obviously digital sales continue to rise. GameStop doesn't make much money off of digital, I'm not saying they make no money off digital because you can buy digital codes from them. In fact, because digital sales are often the same on the eShop as they are in person, sometimes you can go to GameStop and buy a digital copy, get your full credit for it and actually use those bonus points through the GameStop rewards program and get cheaper games in the future. However, I have to say that I would be quite sad if GameStop went on a business. They're also known for really weird business practices, opening brand new games, selling you a used copy as new. There was a whole Xenobit Chronicle situation where they purposely held back stocks so they could overcharge you on the quote unquote used market because they were the exclusive retailer of that game. GameStop did a lot of crappy things, all of this under CEOs that are no longer at the company. Over the last few years there's been a changeover in CEO like three or four times as it seemed like there was no way to fix it. Now the latest CEO, the current CEO, went ahead and hired Reggie Fesame, yes that Reggie Fesame who actually like was the leader of Nintendo America. We all know Reggie, the Reginator, my body is ready. We all know about him, but it's actually not him that is causing GameStop to turn around. In fact, a new investor came up with a plan and that plan has Amazon stock jumping 28% today. 78% the largest jump GameStop has seen since the Xbox 360 days. It's been a long, long time since GameStop has seen this sort of optimism. But before we talk about why they have that optimism, I gotta remind you we have a couple giveaways going on right now. One of them is for a PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X or a Nintendo Switch. The other is for two copies of Pick Me 3 Deluxe. Now you can comment and like the video, subscribe to the channel and enter. Go down into the description to hit the links and all that jazz to make sure you are fully entered into these giveaways. Alright, let's get into what this is. So this article comes from Bloomberg. It says GameStop rises on investors' plan to make it an Amazon rival. So Ryan Cohen is an entrepreneur who built Chewy.com and he built it into a pet supply giant and sold it for $3 billion. He's now pitching GameStop Corporation on a lofty goal, becoming a competitor to Amazon. According to a person familiar with the matter, the video game retailer shares jumped as much as 28% to $11.17 in the New York trading on Tuesday. After Bloomberg News reported Cohen's plans late Monday. That's the stock's highest level since March of 2019. After acquiring nearly a 10% stake in GameStop, making him the company's biggest individual investor, Cohen disclosed on Monday that he is holding talks with management and several board members. I'm sure Reggie's going to be part of that. Cohen's firm, RC Ventures, has expressed willingness to get more involved with the company in order to produce the best results for all shareholders according to a filing. Cohen's vision, which isn't yet public, is to broaden GameStop's online selection and compete head-to-head with some of the biggest e-commerce companies, according to the person. Rather than just offering video games and smattering of toys, clothing and accessories, GameStop website would sell a wide range of merchandise and ship it to customers more quickly, a key strength of Amazon. Of course, challenging Amazon directly would be an uphill fight. Despite relentless competition from traditional retailers and startups, Amazon has only increased its share of the e-commerce industry, and that trend is expected to continue according to eMarketer Inc. Amazon has a market value of almost 1.5 trillion, compared to the 570 million for GameStop. I have a hard time foreseeing how GameStop can morph into a credible competitor to Amazon, since Anthony, Chakawamba and Analyst at Loop Capital. There are a lot of companies with much deeper pockets in GameStop that have a very difficult time competing with Amazon, and some are barely competing with Amazon. Walmart, for an example. Now, Walmart obviously has a lot more success with in-person stores, so they're not as reliant for online. Cohen does have a track record. He co-founded Chewy and served as its chief executive officer. He sold it in 2017 to PetSmart. Its product selection is one of the e-commerce site's selling points. Chewy offers items ranging from dog pajamas to parrot popcorn to saddles for horses. The investor wants the same kind of variety at GameStop according to the person, who has not to be identified because their proposals are private. He also wants the company to improve its customer service and build the infrastructure needed to offer thousands of items and services. Part of his Cohen plan would be to offer more online services. The person said, for instance, customers should be able to trade in old video games online, rather than just in stores. That's a huge thing because you can actually do that on Amazon but a lot of people don't take advantage of it. And GameStop could offer more game streaming subscriptions. The hope is to avoid the fate of Blockbuster Video, which pushed into Oblivion by Netflix and became an online destination for everything from tech toys to tennis rackets. The physical stores would be less of a focus, though profitable locations would remain open. So basically, as long as your local store is profitable, they're not going to close the stores that make them money. But you know, there's going to be more store closures as they focus more online. Think of it like Amazon. There are in-person Amazon stores that are profitable, but I mean most of their business is online. And I think that's the big shift here. It's not clear if GameStop management will implement the proposals. The retailer didn't respond to requests for comment. RC Ventures is trying to comment. The company is already shuttering hundreds of its stores, but it remains a massive brick and mortar chain. As of last quarter, the Grapevine, Texas-paid company have 5,122 locations in 10 countries. Obviously, the new sales are going to help. The new consoles are going to help boost things and all that. The big takeaway here is that Cohen is a very smart man. All right? He went up against Petco. He went up against all these. He was at a massive disadvantage in the pet space when he founded Chewy. A massive disadvantage. Everyone, even Amazon, right? Amazon like sells tons of pet stuff from food and accessories and toys like literally he competes with Amazon. Yet he did it successfully. He made competing easier and more convenient. And because of that, he was able to leverage it into a $3 trillion, or was it a billion dollar, trillion dollar, whatever he sold it for. He sold it for a lot of money, $3 billion. That is a trillion. That's crazy. $3 billion to Pet Smart. So the thing is, he knows what he's doing. He understands the online world of sales better than probably anyone currently at the company. Not even Reggie fully understands the full growth of online or how best to compete. And the proposal is they don't sound unreasonable. Now, when he mentions Amazon, it's because Amazon's the number one retailer for video games. So that's your top competition. GameStop has a name brand. People do go to their website to buy products and buy games. But the website isn't really built in a convenient way for online shopping. That would need to change. So the whole website would need to be completely redesigned. And yes, they would need to allow people to trade in games online. They just have to do it. Or this is another thing. Amazon's a bigot. Allow people to sell items online through GameStop, with GameStop getting just a small cut of that money. So then GameStop kind of assumes less of the risk and more of the profits, I suppose. I guess is the thing there. And obviously, GameStop could benefit from being a game-focused storefront, from retro consoles and retro-collecting all the way through current. They could easily become the go-to destination for the first online before people check out Amazon, before people check out these other retailers, if marketed correctly. And that's the key thing. And that's where Cohen exceeds. He excels greatly at not only product variety, but also at understanding the market trends for the product that he's doing. And I think he gets what gamers do when they buy stuff online. And he wants to make sure that GameStop continues to go down a path that can end up turning the company around even more. When you see a 28% jump in stock prices, that lets you know that people believe in Cohen. They believe Ryan Cohen has a solid plan to turn this company around. And I really hope they do. I don't know if my local store is profitable or not, so I'm not sure if that would be caught up in the casualties. It feels like it would be caught up anyways, even if it wasn't. But I do think that it's interesting to look at the grander scheme. See, GameStop isn't going to close anytime soon. All of the doom and gloom videos that have existed for years, it's like, oh, GameStop is going down. This are 5,000 plus stores. GameStop is not close. Even if they close another 1,000 stores, GameStop is not going away anytime soon. They have too much money. A market value of $570 million means they still have a valuable company. It might not be a multi-billion-dollar company it once was, but they still have a lot of value in that company. They don't have a ton of debt like a lot of other companies do. They're not about to go bankrupt. Even as they lose money quarter over quarter, they're not even close to going bankrupt. They have enough money to get by for, I don't know, five, 10 years. So GameStop's going to be around as a brand. So in this five to 10-year window, they got to find a way to morph into an online hub that gamers trust. And that's the big thing, that gamers trust before they go to Amazon, before they go to Best Buy, before they go to Target or Walmart. That they trust that this is the place they should stop burst for video games. And, you know, I gotta say I kind of hope it works because I do want an online retailer that's focused on video games to succeed. I don't want to just go to generalized retailers that don't specialize even as much as I shop on Amazon. I don't always go there first. And the Honey app helps with that because Honey will be like, hey, look, you can get a better deal on this other website. Don't buy it here, right? Like, I think that GameStop could, you know, they need to start pricing themselves competitively. But I mean, imagine that, you know, as an example, GameStop, you know, has a massive foothold in the used game market. If GameStop was willing to bring the prices of their used games, now say they buy a used game from a customer for $30, right? They'll do that in-store, right? $30, but then they'll sell it for $55. Take a smaller profit margin, sell it for $40. Sell it for $40. You know how quickly you could undercut the used game market? If you would just sell them for like $10 profit over what you spend, the hundreds, thousands, millions of copies of used game, you could push through the stores on a daily basis that would lead to you making way more money. And if you have this entire online ecosystem built where people can trade in and you could sell and it's kind of like an eBay kind of thing, like there's a market for this guys because there is no retailer that specializes in it. There isn't. There is no online retailer, but GameStop that specializes in this particular field. And GameStop doesn't do it very well. They don't. They struggle at it. Their website is still built too much like they are a retail focused website. And they can't do that. They can't do that. They gotta focus more on the online because that's where a majority of business is. If you look at, like companies hurt the most by the COVID thing, it's the in-person companies. Online companies are doing just fine, right? Amazon's exploding. Walmart has seen more sales online this year than they've ever seen. Like online websites are doing fine during COVID because people still need to buy things. They still need essentials. They still want entertainment products. They just might not want to go out in person to do it. That was a big thing with the consoles, with the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. People didn't want to go in person to pre-order it so the sites were slammed even more than any other generation because people didn't want to go in person. There's some people that didn't even have the option to go in person because the stores aren't open. I did go in person before I'm asked, did my social distancing, did my thing, had hand sanitizer. You guys saw the live stream for it if you didn't when I waited for the Xbox Series S. Like, but I also live in a smaller area where the risk is already less. I think that this Cohen guy knows what he's talking about. I mean, he sold the company for $3 billion. Think about how much more value that is than what GameStop is today. I sincerely hope that Reggie and other management people are paying attention and urging the CEO to be like, hey, look, the guy's not saying to close retail. He's saying, hey, we need to cut the fat which they're already doing, but you need to keep cutting the fat but while you cut the fat, make up for the losses by expanding online in a way that makes sense, get with the 21st century and get that online, you know, user base rally behind you. Do some great deals. Like invest in potential losses now for future gains, kind of like Microsoft's doing, losses now for future gains. It's entirely possible. So we'll see what happens. Good luck to GameStop. I hope they make it because I've always had a good time at my local GameStops anyways. I know there's some GameStops from all of America one in particular. I have not had a great experience at, but you know what? I like having a gaming focused, you know, national worldwide retailer. I mean, they own EB games too. Like I like having that as a gamer. I just do. There's something about going to day one launches of games and systems and midnight launches that is just special. And that goes away if these companies go away. I mean, the only place I guess would be Nintendo New York for Nintendo stuff. Anyways, I'm Nathaniel Robidgens from Nintendo Prime. Thanks for joining in and I'll catch you in the next video. And I'll catch you.