this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2023
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Oh goodie, here come the 'people laughed at the internet' survivorship-bias defenses, citing exceptions like their thing's gotta be one.
Steve Jobs fell ass-backwards into a billion dollars, several times over. He thought the Apple II would be an appliance and PHP would replace Flash. There is no such reality-distorting messianic figure for Gamestop. It's a brick-and-mortar video game store, in an era where consoles may not even support physical media, and the PC market is almost entirely digital. They were never special. They were already the merger of several other generic consumer-electronics chains, and the ones that weren't absorbed have all died off.
Y'all managed to throw them an obscene amount of money, for deeply questionable reasons, and they still hit this death spiral. You already did the most you could possibly do, to help them, and it did not work. It is not going to get better. Their entire business model is kinda fucked. Several obvious directions they could go are similarly fucked. Best Buy's not even selling movies, any more.
Honestly, at the height of their relevance, Gamestop's reputation was a sleazy pawn shop for used titles. They got rich buying bare-disc games for $3, total, and selling them for $3 less than a new copy. As digital distribution made that irrelevant slash impossible, they got into toys and collectables, putting them in direct competition with music stores and novelty shops.
Apple survived because Microsoft needed a competitor to avoid getting shattered as a monopoly. Apple took off because Jobs was a marketing-centric bastard who could sell the worst mouse ever designed by making it translucent. Apple exploded because they were the first company stubborn enough to strongarm AT&T into supporting a smartphone without carrier-dictated software. And oh yeah, because their fancy new smartphone didn't fucking do anything, for an entire year, until they announced a proudly-censored monopoly software store that demanded 30% of all money spent on or in any iPhone application.
Gamestop survived because of whatever the hell you'd like to say happened in 2020. They have not taken off. They've cratered. Their prospects are miserable. I cannot even guess what you expect they'll do. I genuinely hope you have a more substantial expectation than 'they'll turn around! :)' because by itself that means literally nothing. But I'm not optimistic about that hope panning out. Concrete predictions would mean the possibility of being dead wrong, at some point in the near future, and it seems evident nobody got here through realistic expectations and reassuring milestones.
i for one believe in the GME turnaround
Thanks for illustrating the empty loyalty I called irrational at the end.
Just a small correction, the thinking was always that HTML5 (not PHP) would replace Flash. Which turned out to be very accurate.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash https://web.archive.org/web/20100501010616/http://www.apple.com/hotnews/thoughts-on-flash/
I'm thoroughly familiar, but hoped to avoid any misinformed eye-rolling based on modern HTML and JS being good. In 2007 - they sucked. We were barely out of the DHTML era. JS was interpreted. Chrome didn't exist yet. Canvas would remain bizarrely slow for another decade. The video tag was barely a proposal. (And Lemmy still fucks up by erasing anything between angle brackets.)
When the iPhone launched, Flash was the only way cool shit happened, inside a browser. Java sucked and nobody used Silverlight. Android phones offering janky Flash support was a genuinely important feature that I routinely relied on for years to come. But all anyone remembers is 'iPhones killed Flash!' as if he didn't completely fail to make "web apps" work, launch the iron-grip App Store, and cushion his reputation with all the money that took.
Same shit happened with the iMac - it could not move data. All anyone remembers is 'iMacs killed floppies!,' but literally every candy-colored iMac I ever saw had a candy-colored USB floppy drive attached. How else were you supposed to get stuff off it? None of them had CD-R drives. USB thumb drives did not meaningfully exist. E-mail attachments had comically tight file-size limits. But that fucker in the turtleneck sold people the moral superiority of being beyond floppy disks, and got fawning press coverage for the radical new... absence of an important feature. Not for the first time and not for the last time.
The lesson you should take from Apple is that people are predictably irrational. They can make good decisions - but under certain conditions, they simply won't. And it's so much easier to fool someone than to convince them they've been fooled. Even as they buy a color-matched floppy drive for their fancy new floppy-less computer.
No Flash on iPhone. No floppy drive on iMac. You don't like Apple. Nevertheless, these products turned around a dying business. So keep an open mind. 🫂
I wish you cared how reasons work.
Why do you care oh so much bro? Hmm?
Why do I care... how reasons work?
Because words matter. Because rational argument is how you avoid getting sucked into any sort of cult bullshit, where ingroup loyalty takes the place of all other decision-making, and then takes all your money.
There's half a dozen people piling on to shout down some fairly simple questions, and not a goddamn one of you has anything to say in your defense. Genuinely nothing. Prove me wrong: tell me why you think this struggling retailer's going to do anything but continue struggling.