Walk into a GameStop in 2026 and something feels off. Pokémon cards and anime figures dominate the floor space where PlayStation titles used to live. That’s not a store layout quirk — it’s the business model. Q1 FY2026 financials tell the story bluntly:
- Collectibles: $348.9 million
- Hardware and accessories: $333.7 million
- Software: $152.7 million (down 13% year-over-year)
Games are now the smallest revenue category at a store called GameStop.
Cohen has been engineering this shift for years, closing over 1,300 stores across two fiscal years while chasing higher-margin product categories. One recent quarter saw software sales crater 27% while profits actually climbed. Think of it like Netflix quietly pivoting away from DVD mailers — the old business didn’t die overnight, but leadership had already moved on.
“Software, it mattered in the past. Software today makes up less than 12% of the business, and collectibles makes up over half the business. So, it’s totally, totally irrelevant.” — Ryan Cohen, Bloomberg TV, July 16, 2026
Worth noting: Bloomberg’s own breakdown puts software at roughly 18% of revenue, not sub-12% as Cohen stated. His broader point still holds, but the rounding was generous to himself.
Sony Accelerates What Was Already Happening
By January 2028, no new PlayStation title will exist on disc — a deadline Sony calls a natural direction and GameStop has already treated as a footnote.
Sony confirmed it will stop producing physical discs for all new PlayStation titles starting January 2028. For GameStop, this registers as a footnote rather than a crisis. Console gaming is following the same path PC gaming took in the 2010s, when digital storefronts rendered physical retail largely irrelevant for software.
The real impact lands on consumers who still value physical media. No new PlayStation discs means:
- No used copies to buy cheap
- No trade-ins
- Ownership replaced by a license tied to a platform account
Game preservation advocates have raised alarms, and Cohen’s public indifference sharpened the backlash — particularly since he previously pushed publicly for disc drives on consoles, according to reporting by SmashJT. That contradiction drew immediate and vocal criticism.
During the same Bloomberg appearance, Cohen floated GameStop’s rejected bid to acquire eBay and stated that “everybody in the media wants GameStop to fail.” The store that defined a generation of Saturday-morning trade-ins now functions closer to a hobby shop with a legacy brand and marketplace ambitions. Whether that qualifies as reinvention or retreat depends entirely on what anyone thought GameStop was ever supposed to be.
