It wasn't so long ago when Reddit, GameStop, and Wall Street were all you'd hear about on the internet. The financial story was set off when Reddit users, and stock hobbyists, melted the stock market by forcing GameStop stock to skyrocket causing at least one major trust fund to almost collapse completely.
It's been a little while since that whole affair now - volatility of stock has settled although as I'm writing this, GME stock is once again on the rise. However, what GameStop as a company has done to try to survive in retail after this mess is unexpected - the company has hired one of the most famous Redditors involved in the debacle.
According to Kotaku, Ryan 'Papa' Cohen is a large part of the WallStreetBets subreddit - one of the major players in the Wall Street situation all those weeks ago. He's heralded as a hero by many of the loyal WallStreetBets Redditors and is a successful businessman in his own right. Having founded Chewy.com - an online pet supplies retailer that went on to be sold to PetSmart for $3.35 billion - Cohen knows online business well and bought a 10% stake in GameStop back in September 2020. This made him the single biggest investor in the company.
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Now, Cohen along with two of Chewy.com's board of directors are working with GameStop on a new "strategic planning and capital allocation committee" to bring the chain into the 21st century. This means ceasing physical store activity and moving to an online business for buying and selling games - gamers could still trade in games they're no longer playing as they did before, but now they'd just post them to GameStop instead.
As Kotaku points out though, this may not be a lasting business model either as both the Xbox Series S and the disc-less PS5 show how consoles are slowly moving to online downloads rather than physical discs and cartridges. If you were at all confused about the WallStreetBets versus WallStreet situation when it was happening, we wrote a great explanation that can help you get up to speed.
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