Semper fi.

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At first I was in your shoes thinking it was a niche thing and that there is no market. Then I started seeing it everywhere on social media. Literally you can scroll through like 10+ reels on IG/Tiktok and you will encounter someone opening pokemon cards, talking about shoes, blind boxes, or something in the collectible space. The game store market is dead because companies like Steam(Valve) control the market now. I myself no longer play console games and have preferred PC mainly because why would I spend more money for lower quality just to play the same game I can play on my computer and even attach a controller if I wanted to use a controller. Along with the fact that all consoles require subscriptions to even play online where its free on the PC. Which leads me to another prediction is that Steam will soon release a steam deck with 5G capabilities soon, along with Nintendo. Since mobile gaming has grown exponentially in recent years there is a huge market for creating mobile gaming devices with internet capabilities that don't require a wi-fi connection. Social media has turned collectibles into a pop-culture trend now. The fact that celebrities are promoting collectibles and there are now multi-million dollar companies capitalizing off blind boxes with "seasonal collectibles". Just shows this is a new growth market on an old boomer idea. PSA has also recently started branch out and grade nearly anything and everything you send in which just shows people are dumb with their money and will collect anything just to fit in the pop-culture trend. Labubu's, Shoes, Clothes, Pinball machines, all of these crazy things that you would never expect to be collectibles are suddenly high value/demand collectibles that make no sense to the average person but suddenly there is a market for them. There is still some what of a gaming focus because there are people who collect games and send them to PSA to get graded as well. GameStop is just preparing themselves for the inevitable pivot where we will probably stop seeing physical games anymore. All games are always offered as a digital option now so game stores are failing. Eventually I suspect we won't see physical games anymore even though there is a demand for it. More and more people are switching over to digital games over physical especially people who want to play a game on release day rather than having to go to a store and hope its in stock before they can play it. There isn't the lines out the door demand that we used to see 30 years ago for a video game release. GameStop's only option is to broaden their market.

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