Everyone has been mourning the death of the Xbox 360 after its marketplace officially shut down earlier this week, recalling some of their favorite memories with the console that introduced them to life-long friends and some of their favorite games. Leave it to GameStop to show up to the party with nothing but petty grievances.
The video game retailer turned meme-stock moonshot took the opportunity of the July 29 shutdown to fire a shot across the bow of digital gaming. âBet yâall wish you bought physical copies now,â the company wrote on Twitter (via The Escapist). âBuy physical.â It was an obvious point delivered by the worst messenger in a way that didnât even make sense.
Good time for you to give folks good value for trade ins, drop the Funko and random merch to make space for more actual games, not gouge the market and become a beloved industry name like Funkoland and EB used to be before you got ahold of them.
— Kitty-Bit Games & Cosplay~ (@kitty_bit_games) July 30, 2024
For starters, the Xbox 360 marketplace is shutting down for sales of new digital games but people can still re-download the ones they already own. Second, the mass adoption of day-and-date digital releases didnât really get underway until the Xbox One era, which is when Microsoft originally proposed DRM that would have effectively ended disc sharing and GameStopâs then-lucrative used game business. Finally, you can still buy most Xbox 360 games digitally on the Xbox One and Series X/S through Microsoftâs backwards compatibility program. Owners and fans wallowing in nostalgia for the Xbox 360 days made these points and more.
âI traded them all in to yâall,â wrote back one person. âYou literally donât sell physical games in your stores anymore, just junk you call âcollectibles,ââ fired back another. A third person pointed out that there was no way to buy physical versions of the hundreds of digital-only indie games and other releases on the platform. Twitter user Joe Kassabian put it more succinctly. âGamestop having the market cornered and then torching their own reputation by ruthlessly fucking over their customers probably had a lot to do with them becoming a NFT scheme stock bro meme that sells funko pops,â he wrote.
When I worked at GS, after certain games ran their course and were deemed âunsellableâ we had to destroy the discs/carts before tossing them out so people wouldnât be able to use them ever again : ) https://t.co/7CIjip2NDA
— Prime (@naturalprime) July 30, 2024
Y'all think I forgot about you taking advantage of FOMO? https://t.co/ua0ewPkvtU pic.twitter.com/YH40dGgMCr
— Chris @ Paldea (@Tsukento) July 30, 2024
gamestop has been & continues to be one of the worst retail establishments to work for. they pressured me to ask customers if they wanted to sell their fucking phone https://t.co/E2HvU8uTpM
— sam (@sniss_) July 30, 2024
We sold them all to you for $32.17 https://t.co/EO3ssHaboz pic.twitter.com/JhzHRWmAoU
— RDCWORLD1 BURNER (PARODY Account) (@rdcburner) July 30, 2024
All the people in the comments drastically missing the point, not understanding GameStop used to look like this https://t.co/BEPiv71KgL pic.twitter.com/8TzZWpCp5x
— Zawa (@ZawaTweets) July 30, 2024
GameStop is currently floundering in the midst of its own death throes. Despite billions in cash on hand, thanks to its logic-defying stock price fueled in part by a cult of personality around its current CEO who likes to cosplay as Elon Musk-lite, the store chainâs workers continue to get squeezed and laid off even as its core business fails to pivot to something more sustainable than warranties and action figures. Itâs impressive how much people, from customers to employees, love games but hate GameStop.
Itâs a testament to how much the chain dropped the ball on physical game sales, retro curation, and special edition pre-orders, that smaller indie stores and mom-and-pop shops have sprouted up to fill the gap. You can still buy Xbox 360 games from GameStop, but youâll probably get a better deal somewhere else.
