Give GameStop (NYSE: GME) credit for being aggressive. The video game retailer best known for giving gamers discounts on used titles while upselling them on new releases has opened a Facebook store.
It'd be ironic if it weren't so predictable. E-commerce sales rose 14.8% to $165.4 billion last year, and Facebook, recently valued at $65 billion, has become the Web's largest strip mall, rife with billboards from some of the world's largest and richest advertisers.
GameStop is Facebook's newest tenant, thanks to a management team that sees its digital future. Last week, the retailer purchased streaming technologist Spawn Labs and the company behind the Impulse digital distribution service.
"Our customers are beginning to consume games in a hybrid manner, both physical and digital, so we are becoming a hybrid company to meet their needs," GameStop President Tony Bartel said in an interview with Gamasutra this week.
Opening a Facebook store is just one element of this strategy. GameStop also owns the social gaming site Kongregate, and its Twitter feed publicizes multiple offers daily. The company has nearly 85,000 followers.
In short: All signs point to GameStop acting as a single source for gaming goodness in the physical, digital, and most recently mobile worlds.
Bartel told Gamasutra that GameStop would create a gaming-specific tablet if Apple (Nasdaq: AAPL), Motorola Mobility (NYSE: MMI), and others fail to create a tab that offers a "great gaming experience" and the ability to sync up with a Bluetooth controller.
Sound good? It does to me.
Of course, the danger in all this is that it takes GameStop away from what it has long done best: creating stores that hard-core gamers find irresistible. But as this same crowd answers the siren call of social gaming -- the same siren call that's led Zynga to a $10 billion valuation -- GameStop risks irrelevance if it doesn't embrace its disrupter.
Do you agree? Disagree? Let us know what you think about GameStop's digital strategy, he rise of social gaming, and whether you'd shop at the company's Facebook store using the comments box below.
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