Obituary for a video game store Gamestop Written, rewritten, and written again. Hundreds of shops closed. By 2023, digital sales will account for more than 75% of global video game revenue. Consoles began shipping without disc drives. The eulogy practically wrote itself: GameStop was a relic, a mall dinosaur, a business model that the Internet had quietly rendered obsolete.
Last Sunday, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen offered to buy eBay for $56 billion.
The meme stock that never dies
Before we get into what that speech actually means, it's worth remembering how we got here. In January 2021, a loosely organized army of retail investors on Reddit's WallStreetBets forum noticed that GameStop — then trading at about $4 a share — was one of the most shorted stocks on the market. Professional traders had bet heavily on its failure. What followed was one of the strangest moments in modern financial history: GameStop's stock rose more than 1,000% in two weeks, short sellers lost billions, and a video game retailer that was supposed to be spiraling down the drain became the most famous company in the world. The meme stock was its mascot of the era.
Cohen, who built Chewy into a billion-dollar pet supply company before selling it, had been quietly accumulating GameStop shares in 2020. He took over as CEO in 2023 and spent the next two years doing something unexpected: instead of chasing digital transformation or pivoting to streaming, he leaned into the aggregation economy. GameStop began stocking Pokémon TCG, trading cards and retro hardware. Hundreds of poorly performing locations were closed. The pile of cash kept growing. Cohen was playing the game longer than anyone realized.
The $56 billion question
Which brings us to the eBay bid — announced Sunday and described by Cohen as a way to create a “legitimate competitor to Amazon.” On paper, the math is bold: GameStop is valued at about $11 billion and is trying to buy a company four times its size. Cohen had $9 billion in cash and a $20 billion commitment from TD Bank, still leaving a significant gap. When pressed on the financing on CNBC, Cohen replied, “I don't understand your question.” Wall Street is skeptical. eBay's board confirmed there were no prior discussions with GameStop before receiving the offer.
But strip away the financial engineering and what you're left with is more interesting than the M&A story: the $56 billion argument that physical, secondhand, and collectible commerce isn't dying—it's the future.
GameStop's pitch on eBay is not random. eBay is the world's largest peer-to-peer marketplace for the things GameStop has spent three years selling — retro games, trading cards, collectibles, used hardware. Cohen sees GameStop's 1,600 remaining U.S. stores not as liabilities, but as verification centers, drop-off points, and direct commerce hubs for eBay's inventory. The overlap is not imagined, it already exists in gaming communities.
Blind spot
This is the part the obituary writers missed. As major publishers pursued digital storefronts and subscription services, the secondary market for physical gaming quietly grew. The global retro gaming market will reach $3.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach $4.18 billion this year – growing at 10% annually, nearly double the rate of the broader console market. Retro console sales were up 32% in the first half of 2025 compared to 2024. Switch 2 physical cartridges are selling strongly despite years of predictions of the end of hardware-based gaming. The Pokémon TCG market continues to print money. Some GTA 6 physical copies are expected to command $80 at launch. The collector economy is no longer a niche; It's the multi-billion-dollar layer of the gaming industry that's been almost completely ignored by the mainstream narrative about “digital killing physical.”
GameStop saw it. Cohen bets on it. And now he's trying to buy the single largest market where that economy already sits.
It's almost beside the point that eBay closes the deal. Cohen could have walked away tomorrow, and Boley would still have made his statement. A dying store looked at one of the Internet's oldest marketplaces, decided it was undervalued, and attempted the largest unsolicited retail acquisition in recent memory. It's not the behavior of a company that believes physical media is finished. That's the behavior of a company that thinks everyone is wrong about what's next.
GameStop has always been better at survival than it has any right to be. This might be the most GameStop thing ever.
