Video game store obituary GameStop has been written, rewritten and written again. Hundreds of store closings. By 2023, digital sales accounted for over 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.
On Sunday, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen offered to buy eBay for $56 billion.
The meme stock that wouldn't die
Before we get to what that commandment actually means, it's worth remembering how we got here. In January 2021, a loosely organized army of private 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 over 1,000% in two weeks, short sellers lost billions, and a video game retailer that was supposed to circle the lake became the most talked about company on Earth. the meme stock era had its mascot.
Cohen, who had built Chewy into a billion-dollar pet supply company before selling it, had been quietly accumulating GameStop stock throughout 2020. He took over as CEO in 2023 and spent the next two years doing something unexpected: instead of chasing digital transformation or pivoting into streaming, he leaned into the collectibles economy. GameStop began stocking Pokemon TCG, trading cards, and retro hardware. Hundreds of underperforming sites were shut down. The cash pile grew. Cohen was playing a longer game than anyone realized.
The $56 billion question
Which brings us to the eBay bid — announced Sunday and described by Cohen as a path to creating “a legitimate competitor to Amazon.” On paper, the math is bold: GameStop is worth roughly $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, which still left a big gap. When pressed on the funding on CNBC, Cohen replied, “I don't understand your question.” Wall Street is skeptical. eBay's board confirmed that it had no previous discussions with GameStop before receiving the offer.
But strip away fintech and what you're left with is something more interesting than an M&A story: a $56 billion argument that brick-and-mortar, pre-owned and collectibles aren't dying — they're the future.
GameStop's pitch to eBay is no accident. eBay is the world's largest peer-to-peer marketplace for exactly the things GameStop has spent three years doing — retro games, trading cards, collectibles, used hardware. Cohen sees GameStop's 1,600 remaining U.S. stores not as liabilities, but as authentication centers, drop-off points and live trading hubs for eBay's inventory. The overlap is not imagined, it already exists in gaming communities.
The blind spot
This is the part the obituary writers missed. While major publishers chased digital storefronts and subscription services, the secondary market for physical games continued to quietly grow. The global retro gaming market reached $3.8 billion in 2025 and is expected to reach $4.18 billion this year – growing at 10% annually, which is roughly double the growth of the wider console market. Retro console sales are up 32% in the first half of 2025 compared to all of 2024. Switch 2 physical cartridges are selling strongly despite years of predictions that hardware-based gaming was done. The Pokemon TCG market continues to print money. GTA 6 physical copies are expected by some to command $80 at launch. The collector economy is no longer a niche; it's a multibillion-dollar layer of the gaming industry that the mainstream narrative of “digital killing physical” has almost completely ignored.
GameStop saw it. Cohen bet on it. And now he's trying to buy the single largest marketplace where that economy already lives.
Whether the eBay store closes is almost gone. Cohen could walk away tomorrow, and the bid would still have made its statement. The supposed-to-die store looked at one of the Internet's oldest marketplaces, decided it was undervalued, and made the biggest unsolicited retail acquisition attempt in recent memory. It is not the behavior of a company that thinks physical media is finished. It's the behavior of a company that thinks everyone else is wrong about what's next.
GameStop has always been better at surviving than it has any right to be. This might be the most GameStop it's ever done.
