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Comment by floren | Hacker News Reader

> "GameStop’s most valuable asset is their database of tens of millions of PowerUp Rewards members that no other competitor has the ability to replicate. GameStop will be able to leverage this data to become a fierce e-commerce competitor over time and has many unexplored avenues to monetize the data."

Yeah, fuck selling products to customers, you've got a bunch of consumer data you can monetize.

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> no other competitor has the ability to replicate

Except Amazon, and Microsoft, and Nintendo, and Sony, and Vale, and Epic, and ...

What am I missing? What's interesting about their purchaser data?

I’m not sure either. Let’s add to that list: Best Buy, Target, Walmart...

vs. MS/Nintendo/Sony - none of those companies will know if a customer has exclusively their consoles, or has other consoles & will buy games on other platforms; could be useful information.

vs. Valve/Epic - similar, AFAIK these are PC-only stores, so again wouldn't be able to determine if customers also have a console (or several) that they play games on.

vs. general retailers e.g. Amazon - more specialised to people buying games; with nothing to back this up, I'd guess that people buying games on e.g. Amazon are more likely to be buying as a gift vs people buying in a dedicated game store (and particularly being registered in a loyalty programme at a game store). (Not saying that most people buying games on Amazon are giving them as gifts, just probably a higher proportion than in gamestop). In cases like that, it's probably less beneficial to target an ad for a game at that person, as they were probably just buying what they were asked for etc.

The silver lining that I pretend to see is maybe now that consumer data "e-commerce" is so common, we'll get some sort of government interaction. Taxes, new laws, something worse, who knows. But _hopefully_ now that it's so prevalent, the general public will become more aware and take it into account when voting.

A fierce e-commerce competitor? Unless GameStop has some massively successful digital storefront I'm unaware of, I highly doubt that.

This is almost certainly the last generation of Sony and Microsoft consoles to support physical media. Even Nintendo has been pushing hard into digital distribution with the Switch.

Couple that with the ongoing death of malls and increasing popularity of PC and mobile gaming platforms (which GS has practically no stake in), and the future looks very bleak for GameStop.

If consumer data was that valuable, RadioShack would have never gone under.

> Yeah, fuck selling products to customers, you've got a bunch of consumer data you can monetize.

I mean, the quote is accurate. GameStop is a middleman in a market where it is completely trivial for producers to sell directly to consumers. That's not a good position to be in, and there's absolutely nothing stopping anyone in the world -- even you! -- from setting up as a competitor and doing a fundamentally just-as-good job. Their business selling products to customers is thoroughly obsolete; it relies on the customers having computers (to run the games) but no internet access (to buy the games).

So it isn't surprising that their business selling products to customers isn't really considered an asset of theirs, and that strategy discussions look for something they can do better than a random guy on the street.

I would say the major thing separating GameStop from me, the random guy on the street, is that GameStop has a large network of brick-and-mortar stores conveniently located throughout the nation, plus existing relationships with publishers.

Throwing all that away because you have email addresses for a bunch of known gamers and will therefore... do... Internet... something... seems like a losing proposition.

But traveling to a brick-and-mortar GameStop store is a gigantic inconvenience compared to the normal and default way to buy a game, which is to purchase and then download it over the internet from the comfort of your home. All the store has to offer is curation.

It depends on your audience. To be fair, I have no idea the breakdown of audience for modern console games. As a young kid, my parents and grandparents would be between me and getting a game (I had no money). So having a store in a mall where I could walk in and show them what I wanted meant I was more likely to get it and it wouldn't be incorrect. My parents are also very big on giving physical gifts.

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