These days, GameStop is less a video game store and more a collectibles dealer. As of March, sales of stuff like Funko Pops and Pokémon cards nearly match its video game sales, according to Sherwood News. GameStop announced last year that it became a Professional Sports Authenticator (PSA) dealer, meaning it can both buy graded cards (something it started before becoming an official PSA dealer) and accept cards to be graded. That’s on top of the big business of selling trading cards, like wildly popular new Pokémon and Magic: The Gathering sets, at retail stores. Trading cards and collectibles helped the company reach its first profitable quarter since 2019, something GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen announced during the company’s yearly annual meeting for stockholders.
GameStop is looking to expand that part of the business: "We are focusing on trading cards as a natural extension of our existing business," Cohen said at the meeting. "The trading card market — whether it's sports, Pokémon, or collectibles — is aligned with our heritage. It fits our trade-in model, it appeals to our core customer base, and it's deeply embedded in physical retail. Unlike software, it's tactile. Unlike hardware, it has high margin potential. It's a logical expansion."
Aftermath has reached out to GameStop for more information on what this expansion looks like.
Demand for trading cards, specifically Pokémon cards, is exceptionally high. It’s a boom that started during the COVID-19 pandemic and has continued to stay popular; people are both buying and selling individual cards while camping out for sealed, boxed sets hoping for rare pulls. (Or, simply, to scalp the sealed sets for tons of money.) The Pokémon Company has apologized several times for not being able to meet the high demand, continuously printing more and more cards. The Pokémon Company printed 10 billion cards in 2024, it reported in March. The year prior, the company had printed nearly 12 billion cards. The biggest jump in cards was from 2021 to 2022, from almost 4 billion to 9 billion cards printed.
It makes sense that GameStop, notoriously in the red businesswise, would turn to what’s making it money right now. But can its retail business handle it? Do workers want to handle it?
GameStop reportedly no longer offers pre-orders for Pokémon cards, a policy that was implemented in February. People can still buy online, but the policy also drives people to retail stores to skip out on the mess of bots trying to secure that stock. This can mean long lines and lots of people at stores on release days. On Reddit, GameStop workers have shared horror stories about the rush of people — scalpers, hobbyists, and people looking to buy and sell graded cards — coming into the store for trading cards. “Trading cards are killing me,” one person wrote. Asked in a thread if GameStop workers hate Pokémon collectors, a former worker wrote: “Just because you weren't rude doesn't mean I haven't been literally called slurs for not having pokemon cards in my store, lol. I think most of us are just fuckin tired boss, with no real end in sight unless you dip out on the company.”
“I have had my life threatened 5 times in 3 weeks over pokemon, a line at my door everyday,” another person wrote. “I think we are just over it to be honest.”
Cohen did, in his annual stockholder speech, address the hard work of retail:
Most important, none of this would be possible without the people doing the actual work, our store employees and warehouse teams. They're the ones listing inventory, sweating on the job, serving customers, processing trade-ins, and keeping the business running.
They're not wasting time in Zoom meetings, they're not in PowerPoint decks, they're on their feet, every single day working hard and serving customers. They're the backbone of GameStop.
He posited that “excessive executive pay, DEI initiatives that prioritize image over merit, managers managing to Wall Street's short-term expectations and analysts, and boards handing out free stock like candy to people who would never buy a share themselves” is normal in corporate America, but that GameStop isn’t like that. “We're a company that treats shareholder capital as our own, because it is,” he said.
What Cohen did not address is that the increased value of Pokémon cards has caused problems for retailers: Target had to temporarily stop selling trading cards in 2021 because people were getting into fights over them. More than a thousand dollars worth of Pokémon cards were stolen from an Oregon store in May; two stores in Detroit were robbed of Pokémon cards last month, too. In Missouri, a 27-year-old man was arrested in March and sentenced to six years in prison in May for stealing hundreds of dollars worth of Pokémon cards from several stores. In the U.K., a man was arrested — again, in May — for a heist of Pokémon cards valued at £250,000. Trading card crimes are reportedly up in Japan, too. In February, an estimated $1 million worth of Pokémon cards were stolen from multiple stores across Melbourne.
It's a global phenomenon as trading card theft seemingly rises, and not necessarily a problem unique to GameStop. But it's a problem that impacts GameStop's workers, one the company needs to address. Speaking to Polygon in 2023, workers pointed to GameStop sometimes scheduling one employee to a store for a shift, making certain shops easy targets.
The details of GameStop’s further drive into trading cards could exacerbate the problem. GameStop has been closing stores en masse and laying off employees across the country, driving customers to a small subset of understaffed locations — all while GameStop itself pivots to bitcoin, for some reason. Despite Cohen’s ostensible praise of GameStop’s on-the-ground employees, he hasn’t yet shared how, exactly, the trading card expansion will impact them — and how GameStop will keep an already tenuous situation from getting worse.
