GameStop

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Description

GameStop is an American video game, consumer electronics and gaming merchandise retailer. The company is headquartered in Grapevine, Texas, United States, a suburb of Fort Worth, and operates 5,509 retail stores throughout the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Europe as of February 1, 2020. The company's retail stores primarily operate under the GameStop, EB Games, ThinkGeek and Micromania-Zing brands.

Operations

GameStop is divided into two operating segments: Video Game Brands and Technology Brands. The Technology Brands segment was created during the fourth quarter of 2013 and houses the companies Simply Mac, Spring Mobile, and Cricket Wireless. As of April 2014, the Technology Brands segment included 218 retail outlets. GameStop's Video Game Brands segment includes the company's other businesses such as video game and consumer electronics retail shops; Kongregate, a digital video game distribution site; and buymytronics.com, a consumer electronics marketplace. Pre-owned and value video games accounted for 47% of GameStop's gross revenue for the fiscal year ending February 2014.

History

GameStop traces its roots to Babbage's, a Dallas, Texas-based software retailer founded in 1984 by former Harvard Business School classmates James McCurry and Gary M. Kusin. The company was named after Charles Babbage and opened its first store in Dallas's North Park Center with the help of Ross Perot, an early investor in the company. The company quickly began to focus on video game sales for the then-dominant Atari 2600. Babbage's began selling Nintendo games in 1987. The company went public in 1988. By 1991, video games accounted for two-thirds of Babbage's sales.