GameStop Is Shrinking Its Stores While Super-Sizing Its Bet on Ryan Cohen
Date Published
TL;DR
Quick Summary
- GameStop is closing more than 1,000 stores by early 2026, trading mall footprint for a leaner cost base and higher profitability.
- CEO Ryan Cohen’s new pay package only pays out if GME hits up to $100B in market value and $10B in cumulative EBITDA.
- Revenue has been shrinking since 2023, but GameStop generated about $131M in net income for 2024 and is stringing together profitable quarters with nearly $4.8B in cash as of early 2025.
#RealTalk
GameStop is no longer just a meme, but it’s also not a simple value play. You’re effectively judging whether a shrinking retailer and a high‑profile operator can grow into a very ambitious story arc.
Bottom Line
For investors watching GME, the core tension is simple: operationally, the company is getting tighter and more profitable while structurally becoming smaller and more concentrated. The Cohen package makes the equity feel like a long-duration bet on a specific leader and a very aggressive growth target, not just a call on video game retail. How you interpret that risk–reward mix will likely matter more than any single quarter’s sales print. Meme history is the backdrop now, not the thesis. 🎯
Where do you go with a company that closed more than a thousand stores in two years and is still chasing a $100 billion valuation target? If you’re GameStop Corp. (GME), you hand your CEO a compensation plan that only pays him if he actually gets there.
Ryan Cohen’s new pay package, announced on January 7, 2026, is basically a moonshot contract. No salary, no cash bonus, no time-vested stock. Instead, he gets options to buy more than 171 million shares at $20.66—but only if GameStop hits a series of market cap and profit milestones that top out at $100 billion in value and $10 billion in cumulative EBITDA. Miss the marks, get nothing.
That structure does two things. First, it leans into the cult of the founder-operator, putting Cohen in the same general conversation as other “swing for the fences” CEO packages we’ve seen. Second, it turns GME itself into the scorecard. If you own the stock, you don’t just watch quarterly numbers—you’re effectively watching whether this bet on Cohen ever comes even close to paying out.
Meanwhile, the underlying business looks very different from the nostalgia version where you lined up at the mall for midnight releases.
Between fiscal 2024 and the end of January 2026, GameStop is on track to close more than 1,000 stores, including over 430 U.S. locations announced on January 11, 2026, across 42 states. A separate wave is hitting New York specifically, where roughly 30 stores are shutting down this month. At its peak, the company had more than 6,000 shops. By the time this downsizing wave is done, it’s expected to have fewer than 2,000 globally.
On paper, the consolidation is doing what it’s supposed to do. Net sales have been trending down—full-year 2024 revenue fell to about $3.8 billion, from $5.3 billion in 2023—but profitability has flipped. For the year ended February 1, 2025, GameStop reported net income of roughly $131 million, versus just $6.7 million the year before. Operating performance improved as SG&A costs came down quarter after quarter.
Zoom into 2025, and the pattern holds. The first quarter, reported June 10, 2025, showed lower sales than the prior year but a much narrower operating loss as international restructuring rolled through. By the second quarter, ending August 2, 2025, GameStop delivered about $972 million in sales, up more than 20% year over year, with operating income swinging positive. In the third quarter, disclosed December 9, 2025, sales dipped slightly versus 2024 but the company posted over $41 million in operating income, compared with a loss a year earlier.
Underneath the store closures and cost cuts, there’s also the balance sheet flex. As of the 2024 year-end report in March 2025, GameStop held nearly $4.8 billion in cash, equivalents and marketable securities after a series of equity raises and a brief experiment with holding Bitcoin on its balance sheet. That cash hoard is a big part of why interest income has become a meaningful profit driver.
Layer onto that Cohen’s own buying. Regulatory filings and recent coverage show he purchased around 1 million additional shares in January 2026 for roughly $21 million, bringing his stake to more than 42 million shares, or about 9% of the company. Another director has been adding too. For a stock that still lives rent-free in meme history, insider buying at least signals that the people in charge are willing to suffer alongside everyone else if things go sideways.
So what is GameStop in 2026? It’s not the 2021 squeeze replay that some corners of the internet still daydream about. It’s a much smaller, more tightly run specialty retailer with a huge cash cushion, shrinking revenue base, improving profitability—and an extremely public, all-or-nothing challenge laid down in front of its CEO.
For next-gen investors, the question isn’t “Will it moon?” so much as: can a leaner, mostly brick-and-mortar retailer plus a charismatic capital allocator justify anything close to the expectations baked into that $100 billion dream? That’s the story to watch from here. 🎮