Dueling Fools: GameStop Bear Rebuttal

My dueling partner Steven Mallas was absolutely right in his opening salvo when he mentioned this aspect about GameStop's (NYSE: GME) business: "When consumers buy another system (or two), they buy a bunch of higher-margin software and accessories to go with it." Therein lays both the source of the company's tremendous growth and the seeds of its future problems.

With Sony's (NYSE: SNE) PlayStation 3 fetching in the neighborhood of $500 to $600 for the console alone, that's a lot of retailer revenue from an initial purchase. Add in the games and accessories bought with the console, and you wind up with a tremendous one-time boost to a retailer's revenue from the initial platform purchase.

What happens next year, when everyone who has to have a fully loaded system and the hottest games already does? Yeah, there'll still be new games to buy, but there'll likely be a glut of returns of last year's hot titles to GameStop's vaunted used video game marketplace. Even if new game sales stay brisk long after the consoles have saturated the market, it takes a lot of games to make up for the console a retailer didn't sell to the gamers who already had one. Try as they might, hype as they will, and hope all they want that this time will be different, the odds are still quite strong that history will once again repeat itself. The tremendous growth that GameStop is seeing now looks suspiciously like the strongest part of the industry's repeated boom and bust cycles.

Whether it's automobiles, steel, or video games, the time to buy the companies involved in any cyclical industry is when things look their worst. Counting on growth to the sky to justify an investment is just as dangerous a practice today as it has ever been.

Go back and read the rest of the arguments. Then vote for the winner.

GameStop is a Motley Fool Stock Advisor selection.

At the time of publication, Fool contributor Chuck Saletta did not own shares of any company mentioned in this rebuttal. The Fool has a disclosure policy.