GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen has recently stated that Sony discontinuing all physical media won’t be affecting their company in any major way cause sales for physical editions of videogames have increasingly become “totally irrelevant” to their business. In a July 16 interview with Bloomberg TV, the CEO has said that GameStop wouldn’t be much affected with Sony’s recent industry-altering decision as videogames only make up for a tiny section of income for the company.
“It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter at all,” he told the outlet. “Software… it mattered in the past. Software today makes up less than 12% of the business, and collectibles makes up over half the business. So it’s totally, totally irrelevant.”
“GameStop is a business that was on the brink of bankruptcy, and everybody was betting against it for good reason,” Cohen said earlier in the interview. “And now the company is making more money than it’s ever made in its history.”
Elsewhere in the interview, the CEO also made some interesting comments on GameStop, saying that a large part of the media actually wants the company to fail.
“Because everybody in the media wants GameStop to fail,” Cohen said. “Explain that to me: why everybody in the media, in the mainstream media, wants GameStop to fail.”
He also went on to say that Gamestop as a company along with it’s business model are living embodiment of what American businesses ought to be.
“There’s nothing more American than GameStop committing its balance sheets, and this company, which is a great American company—eBay—being aligned with shareholders,” he said. “That’s how this country was built—is risking your own capital. And if the business succeeds, you make money. And if the business fails, you lose a lot of money.
“What I want to understand is why everybody wants GameStop to fail? Both in its core business and in this transaction. What world do we live in where we’re rooting for an entrenched management team that has no skin in the game and someone that’s risking their own capital—and there’s nothing more American than that—you want us to fail. I want to understand that.”
