Given the condition the current GPU market and, well, the PC hardware market as a whole, would be an interesting business decision for any company to start selling components. But this is 2021, and all logic to be cursed; GameStop will start selling graphics cards.
Conformable PCMagGameStop CEO George Sherman told investors during a call earnings Tuesday that the company is expanding its product catalog to include everything a PC player would ever need in a battle station. Despite the decline in the company’s net sales for the fourth quarter of 2020—$ 2.12 billion compared to $ 2.19 billion in the fourth quarter of 2019 – the gaming retailer seems confident that expanding into PC gaming is the right move. Even with declining net sales and a tumultuous year overall, GameStop has seen an explosion in e-commerce, which explains its pivot to PC components sales. But the company will not focus exclusively on GPUs.
Sherman said that the new section of PC games from GameStop’s The site will include pre-built desktops, gaming laptops, game tables, game TVs, monitors and more. The main center for everything that will be GameStop.com/PCGaming in the future, but for now it redirects to another address where you can get other things related to PC games.
Currently, the only way you can search for a graphics card is by typing “RTX 3080” or something similar in the search bar, as PCMag points out. There is no obvious link to that page, surprisingly, because no stock available. But that didn’t stop GameStop from giving up Local commercials with multiple RTX 30 graphics cards for sale. (To be fair, the website says it expects an RTX 3060 MSI Gaming X Trio to be available on April 16, but it is listed at 690 USD, that is 361 USD above the recommended price.
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Intel and AMD processors are visibly missing from PC games sectionhowever, even from the search option. This one it seems that GameStop sells everything except the processor, which is undoubtedly the most important part of the entire gaming PC. It may add processors to the inventory sometime in the near future, but the CPU market is as tense as the GPU market right now, so it seems unlikely.
It’s good that GameStop wants to go in this direction, but how is the company doing robots and scalpers remains to be seen. It could go down the Micro Center route and could force people to buy GPUs in store or offer them only for personal pick-up. This will help alleviate the scalpers, though not completely; people can still scalp a single GPU they bought from Micro Center or another retailer, as we have seen in the past.
Eventually, GameStop will have to move PC gamers away from other retailers, including Micro Center and Newegg, which has been carrying PC components for years. It seems that GameStop hopes to attract customers by carrying some evasive graphics cards and hoping that they will stay for a motherboard or a power supply.