Everyone has been mourning the death of the Xbox 360 after its marketplace officially shut down earlier this week, recalling some of their favorite memories with the console that introduced them to life-long friends and some of their favorite games. Leave it to GameStop to show up to the party with nothing but petty grievances.
The video game retailer turned meme-stock moonshot took the opportunity of the July 29 shutdown to fire a shot across the bow of digital gaming. “Bet y’all wish you bought physical copies now,” the company wrote on Twitter (via The Escapist). “Buy physical.” It was an obvious point delivered by the worst messenger in a way that didn’t even make sense.
For starters, the Xbox 360 marketplace is shutting down for sales of new digital games but people can still re-download the ones they already own. Second, the mass adoption of day-and-date digital releases didn’t really get underway until the Xbox One era, which is when Microsoft originally proposed DRM that would have effectively ended disc sharing and GameStop’s then-lucrative used game business. Finally, you can still buy most Xbox 360 games digitally on the Xbox One and Series X/S through Microsoft’s backwards compatibility program. Owners and fans wallowing in nostalgia for the Xbox 360 days made these points and more.
“I traded them all in to y’all,” wrote back one person. “You literally don’t sell physical games in your stores anymore, just junk you call ‘collectibles,’” fired back another. A third person pointed out that there was no way to buy physical versions of the hundreds of digital-only indie games and other releases on the platform. Twitter user Joe Kassabian put it more succinctly. “Gamestop having the market cornered and then torching their own reputation by ruthlessly fucking over their customers probably had a lot to do with them becoming a NFT scheme stock bro meme that sells funko pops,” he wrote.
GameStop is currently floundering in the midst of its own death throes. Despite billions in cash on hand, thanks to its logic-defying stock price fueled in part by a cult of personality around its current CEO who likes to cosplay as Elon Musk-lite, the store chain’s workers continue to get squeezed and laid off even as its core business fails to pivot to something more sustainable than warranties and action figures. It’s impressive how much people, from customers to employees, love games but hate GameStop.
It’s a testament to how much the chain dropped the ball on physical game sales, retro curation, and special edition pre-orders, that smaller indie stores and mom-and-pop shops have sprouted up to fill the gap. You can still buy Xbox 360 games from GameStop, but you’ll probably get a better deal somewhere else.