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A quarter that made the meme stock crowd blink
GameStop came in swinging with its most profitable quarter ever: $389.6 million in net income on $835.3 million in sales. The stock jumped about 12% after hours, which is what happens when a company that used to live and die by video game discs suddenly starts looking like a cash hoarder with a side hustle.
The real money isn’t from game sales anymore
The old GameStop story is basically taking a back seat. The collectibles business — think Pokémon cards, sports cards, and all the shiny stuff collectors will fight over online — grew 65% year over year to $348.9 million and became the company’s biggest revenue line. Meanwhile, SG&A fell to $201.6 million as Ryan Cohen keeps shrinking the store base and trimming overhead like he’s Marie Kondo with a spreadsheet.
- Net income: $389.6 million
- Sales: $835.3 million, up 14% year over year
- Cash, marketable securities, and digital assets: $9.7 billion
- New buyback authorization: $2 billion through 2029
The eBay subplot is the real soap opera
Here’s where it gets spicy: a big chunk of the profit came from a $268.4 million unrealized gain on eBay derivatives, which means the company’s record quarter is doing a lot of heavy lifting for that headline number. GameStop also still holds exposure to roughly 29 million eBay shares through put/call pairs, so if eBay moves, GameStop’s earnings can lurch around like a shopping cart with one bad wheel.
And then there’s the actual deal drama. Polymarket is pricing the rumored $55.5 billion eBay bid at just 16% odds of closing, which feels less like a clean M&A story and more like a financial choose-your-own-adventure with debt, dilution, and a looming proxy fight.
Big picture: cash is king, but the plot is messy
GameStop is looking less like a dying retailer and more like a weird hybrid of collectibles shop, treasury vehicle, and deal-speculation machine. That can work for a while — until the mark-to-market gains fade, the takeover math gets uglier, or investors decide they’d rather own actual growth than financial wizardry.