Given the state of current GPU market and, well, the PC hardware market as a whole, it would be an interesting business decision for any company to start selling components. But it’s 2021, and all logic be damned; GameStop will start selling graphics cards.
According PCMag, GameStop CEO, George Sherman, told investors during a earnings call on Tuesday that the The company is expanding its product catalog to include everything a PC player would need in a battle station. Despite the company’s drop in net sales in the fourth quarter of 2020—$ 2.12 billion compared to $ 2.19 billion in the fourth quarter of 2019 – the game retailer seems confident that expanding to PC games is the right move. Despite the drop in net sales and a tumultuous year overall, GameStop saw an explosion in e-commerce, which helps explain its pivot in the sale of PC components. But the company will not focus only on GPUs.
Sherman said the new PC gaming section of GameStop’s the site will include pre-built desktops, gaming laptops, gaming tables, gaming TVs, monitors and more. The main center of everything that will be GameStop.com/PCGaming in the future, but for now it redirects to a different address, where you can get other things related to PC games.
Currently, the only way to search for a video card is to type ‘RTX 3080’ or something similar in the search bar, as indicated by PCMag. There is no obvious link to this page, unsurprisingly, because there is no stock available. But that didn’t stop GameStop from launching local ads with multiple RTX 30 series graphics cards for sale. (To be fair, the site says that an RTX 3060 MSI Gaming X Trio is expected to be available on April 16, but is listed at $ 690, which is $ 361 above the suggested price.
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Intel and AMD processors are noticeably absent from PC games section, however, even from the search option. This It looks like GameStop is selling everything but the CPU, which is arguably the most important part of the entire gaming PC. Maybe it will add processors to its stock sometime in the near future, but the CPU market is just as tense as the GPU market at the moment, so it seems unlikely.
It’s very good that GameStop wants to go in that direction, but how the company deals bots and money changers remains to be seen. You can follow the Micro Center route and require people to buy GPUs in store or offer them for in-person pick-up only. This will help to mitigate money changers, though not entirely; people can still scale a single GPU purchased from Micro Center or another retailer, as we saw in the past.
Ultimately, GameStop will have to move PC players away from other tried and tested retailers, including Micro Center and Newegg, which have been carrying PC components for years. It looks like GameStop hopes to attract customers by carrying some elusive graphics cards and expecting them to stay to buy a motherboard or power supply.