GameStop faces more lay-offs

GameStop has laid off more of its employees for the second time this year, particularly in the company’s software engineering department

A new wave of lay-offs has reportedly hit games retailer GameStop in the US, with the company’s software engineering staff seemingly hit the hardest.

As reported by TheGamer, GameStop has laid off at least six software engineers, and one has stated that there’s been “another big round of lay-offs”. The laid off employee said that the lay-offs affected “E-Commerce Product and Engineers … Lots of them.”

Axios reports that it has been unable to confirm the scale of the lay-offs, with GameStop refusing to reply to multiple requests for comment. According to Axios, most of the lay-offs seem to have been in the team working on GameStop’s blockchain wallet.

GameStop is one of the largest games retailers in the world, operating over 4000 stores around the world. It’s the parent company of EB Games Australia, which was reportedly the only arm of the company not to report losses during the COVID-19 pandemic.

GameStop is the parent company of EB Games Australia. Photo: AAP Image/MATT LOXTON

It faced a huge round of lay-offs in July of this year, firing hundreds of corporate employees as well as the company’s chief financial officer Mike Recupero. Estimates at the time suggested that up to 25% of the entire company’s corporate workforce, but store employees were largely retained.

The company launched its own NFT (non-fungible token) platform earlier in the year, too, allowing users to buy and sell images to each other hosted on the Ethereum blockchain. The endeavour has been ripe with controversy since its launch, and has largely been unsuccessful.

Just weeks after opening, the NFT marketplace had its worst revenue day, with revenue falling to just $18 an hour for the company. Even at its peak, at the time the marketplace earned as little as $675 an hour for GameStop, with the marketplace seeing minimal use and few users.

It’s also been mired in controversy, with one user selling dozens of NFTs featuring artwork from a game they did not have the rights to, and another selling a horrific NFT of an image mocking the 9/11 terrorist attacks. GameStop took down the NFTs in both cases, but it attracted a lot of bad press early on in the marketplace’s life.

Written by Oliver Brandt on behalf of GLHF.