Goodbye EB Games. You Will Be Missed.

I like to let my nerd flag fly on the back page, so there’s nowhere more appropriate than here to set up a tombstone and tip one out for EB Games closing up shop across the country.
We went in on one of the final days to pick through its corpse. It was swarming with people and most of the shelves were bare, even with half the shop roped off. EB has been gutted by a change in game purchasing over the years. Why buy physical when you can just download the game as soon as it releases? Most PC’s and Xboxes don’t even have disc drives anymore. Even Nintendo has pushed for developers to make physical media redundant by making most Switch 2 cartridges “game key cards”, empty bits of plastic that lets you do a digital download. So EB had to pivot, they brought in board games and D&D books, which was cool. Then a ton of merch, T-shirts and funkopops dominated the shelves. Videogames shrunk to a sidekick role. What was truly sad that on the day we arrived there was a solitary bin of videogames left, all the rest were gone. The rest of the shelves were still full of t-shirts and Funko Pops. The thing they couldn’t sell which forced them to pivot were the first things to go. There feels like there should be a cruel lesson to learn here. I’m not entirely sure what it is. In other news Michael Burry is buying big on GameStop.