GameStop Competitors

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Many consider GameStop to have a near-monopoly on video game retail stores. Nevertheless, there do exist some major competitors which include: Best Buy, Amazon, Sony and Nintendo, Valve, Game Retail Limited, and JB Hi-Fi.

 

CompetitorDescriptionKey InsightsCompetitive OverlapDifferentiation
AmazonA multinational e-commerce and technology company known for its online retail marketplace. Amazon competes with GameStop in the video game and entertainment retail space.Amazon offers a wide range of products, including video games and consoles, directly competing with GameStop in segments like video game retail, targeting consumers looking for gaming and entertainment products.Both compete in the video game and entertainment retail market, offering a variety of gaming products, with Amazon’s focus on its online marketplace and diverse product offerings.Amazon’s extensive online marketplace and Prime membership benefits.
Best BuyA multinational consumer electronics and appliance retailer known for its physical stores and online presence. Best Buy competes with GameStop in the consumer electronics and gaming retail space.Best Buy offers a range of consumer electronics, including gaming consoles and accessories, indirectly competing with GameStop in segments like video game retail, targeting consumers seeking gaming products and electronics.Both compete in the consumer electronics and gaming retail market, providing gaming-related products, with Best Buy’s focus on its physical retail presence and expertise in consumer electronics.Best Buy’s physical retail locations and Geek Squad services.
WalmartA multinational retail corporation known for its discount stores and e-commerce platform. Walmart competes with GameStop in the general merchandise and video game retail sectors.Walmart offers a variety of products, including video games and gaming consoles, directly competing with GameStop in segments like video game retail, targeting a broad range of consumers looking for gaming and entertainment items.Both compete in the video game and entertainment retail market, offering gaming products alongside other merchandise, with Walmart’s focus on its extensive retail network and affordability.Walmart’s extensive physical retail locations and competitive pricing.
TargetA retail corporation known for its department stores and online shopping platform. Target competes with GameStop in the general merchandise and video game retail sectors.Target offers a range of products, including video games and gaming accessories, indirectly competing with GameStop in segments like video game retail, targeting consumers seeking gaming and entertainment products alongside other merchandise.Both compete in the video game and entertainment retail market, providing gaming-related items within their stores, with Target’s focus on its department store experience and exclusive merchandise.Target’s department store experience and exclusive collaborations.
Microsoft StoreMicrosoft’s retail and online storefront for its software, hardware, and gaming products, including Xbox consoles and games. The Microsoft Store competes with GameStop in the video game and software retail space.The Microsoft Store offers Microsoft’s gaming consoles, software, and accessories, directly competing with GameStop in segments like video game retail, targeting gamers and consumers interested in Microsoft products.Both compete in the video game and software retail market, offering Microsoft gaming products, with the Microsoft Store’s focus on its exclusive software titles and hardware offerings.The Microsoft Store’s exclusive Microsoft product offerings.
PlayStation Store (Sony)Sony’s online marketplace for purchasing PlayStation games, add-ons, and content. The PlayStation Store competes with GameStop in the digital gaming and software retail space.The PlayStation Store offers digital games and content for PlayStation consoles, indirectly competing with GameStop in segments like digital game retail, targeting gamers who prefer downloadable content.Both compete in the digital gaming and software retail market, providing digital games and content for gaming consoles, with the PlayStation Store’s focus on exclusive PlayStation titles.The PlayStation Store’s exclusive PlayStation game offerings.
Nintendo eShopNintendo’s digital storefront for purchasing and downloading games, add-ons, and content for Nintendo consoles. The Nintendo eShop competes with GameStop in the digital gaming and software retail space.The Nintendo eShop offers digital games and content for Nintendo consoles, indirectly competing with GameStop in segments like digital game retail, targeting Nintendo gamers who prefer downloadable content.Both compete in the digital gaming and software retail market, providing digital games and content for Nintendo consoles, with the Nintendo eShop’s focus on exclusive Nintendo titles.The Nintendo eShop’s exclusive Nintendo game offerings.
GameFlyA video game rental and subscription service known for offering physical and digital game rentals. GameFly competes with GameStop in the video game rental and subscription space.GameFly provides video game rental and subscription services, directly competing with GameStop in segments like game rental and subscription, targeting gamers who prefer renting or accessing games through subscriptions.Both compete in the video game rental and subscription market, offering game rental and subscription services, with GameFly’s focus on its rental-by-mail service and game library.GameFly’s game rental-by-mail service and subscription options.
Steam (Valve)A digital distribution platform known for its extensive library of PC and Mac games. Steam competes with GameStop in the digital gaming and software retail space.Steam offers a wide range of digital games and software titles, indirectly competing with GameStop in segments like digital game retail, targeting PC and Mac gamers who prefer downloadable content.Both compete in the digital gaming and software retail market, providing digital games and software downloads, with Steam’s focus on its extensive library and gaming community features.Steam’s extensive library of PC and Mac games and community features.
Epic Games StoreA digital storefront for purchasing and downloading PC games, developed by Epic Games. The Epic Games Store competes with GameStop in the digital gaming and software retail space.The Epic Games Store offers a selection of digital PC games, directly competing with GameStop in segments like digital game retail, targeting PC gamers who prefer downloading games through the Epic Games Store.Both compete in the digital gaming and software retail market, providing digital PC game downloads, with the Epic Games Store’s focus on exclusives and free game offerings.The Epic Games Store’s exclusive PC game titles and free game promotions.

Best Buy

A North American big-box retailer founded in 1966. Though not an exclusive dealer in video games, Best Buy operates around 1,000 stores in the United States alone.

Amazon

The eCommerce giant has an extensive range of video games, consoles, legacy systems, and related equipment. Amazon can likely offer the same titles for a more competitive price than GameStop.

Sony and Nintendo

These companies are major GameStop partners. But since they also sell video games and game consoles direct to consumers, they are also competitors.

Valve

Digital game developer Valve was founded in 1996 and is known for the Steam gaming platform and titles such as Counter-Strike and Team Fortress. Valve does not operate physical stores, but it remains poised to benefit as consumers shift toward online gaming.

Game Retail Limited

A significant player in the British and Spanish market with approximately 250 stores is Game Retail Limited. The company was acquired by Frasers Group in 2019 and soon after shifted its focus on online video game sales.

JB Hi-Fi

An Australian retailer with more than 300 locations in Australia and New Zealand. The company operates several superstore outlets that only sell video game-related products for PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, and PC gaming. The company acquired retail chain The Good Guys for $870 million in 2016 and obtained a 24% market share in consumer electronics.

Key takeaways:

  • GameStop is an American retailer of video games, consumer electronics, and gaming merchandise. The company was founded in 1984 and was recently the subject of a short squeeze by Reddit investors.
  • GameStop operates a mass-market business model with no significant variation between customer segments. The company has a value proposition comprised of four parts: accessibility, innovation, convenience, and brand/status.
  • GameStop may enjoy a near-monopoly in video game retail stores, but it still competes with big-box retailer Best Buy and eCommerce giant Amazon. In the United Kingdom and Australia, the company faces strong competition from Game Retailed Limited and JB Hi-Fi respectively.

Major Competitors of GameStop: Key Takeaways

  • Competitors Overview: While GameStop is often seen as having a near-monopoly on video game retail stores, it faces competition from several major players in the industry, including Best Buy, Amazon, Sony and Nintendo, Valve, Game Retail Limited, and JB Hi-Fi.
  • Best Buy: Founded in 1966, Best Buy is a North American big-box retailer with around 1,000 stores in the United States. Although it sells a variety of products, it also offers video games and gaming equipment.
  • Amazon: As an eCommerce giant, Amazon provides an extensive range of video games, consoles, and related equipment. Its competitive pricing could attract customers away from GameStop.
  • Sony and Nintendo: While these companies are partners of GameStop, selling video games and consoles directly to consumers makes them competitors as well.
  • Valve: Valve, a digital game developer known for Steam and popular titles like Counter-Strike and Team Fortress, doesn’t operate physical stores but benefits from the shift toward online gaming.
  • Game Retail Limited: A major player in the UK and Spain, Game Retail Limited operates around 250 stores. It shifted its focus to online video game sales after being acquired by Frasers Group in 2019.
  • JB Hi-Fi: An Australian retailer with over 300 locations in Australia and New Zealand, JB Hi-Fi focuses on video game-related products for PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo, and PC gaming. It also acquired retail chain The Good Guys in 2016.

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Competitors Case Studies

Zoominfo Competitors

zoominfo-competitors
Zoominfo is an American software-as-a-service (SaaS) company founded by Henry Schuck and Kirk Brown in 2007. The company sells access to the most comprehensive B2B database in the world to help sales and marketing teams better communicate with prospects. Zoominfo held an IPO in June 2020 raising $935 million. Like similar software companies that are valuable to remote teams, demand for the Zoominfo platform increased because of the coronavirus pandemic. It is now used by over 20,000 businesses, with clients including T-Mobile, Zoom, Amazon, and Google.

Spotify Competitors

spotify-competitors
Spotify is the world’s largest music streaming platform with over 381 million users across 184 markets around the world. The company was founded by Martin Lorentzon and Daniel Ek in 2008 in response to the shutdown of peer-to-peer music service Napster. Spotify became a success because it was the first company to determine how to distribute music legally and compensate the music industry at the same time. The platform now offers various curated music discovery services, music stations, audio customization, and private listening. In recent times, it has also ventured into the streaming of audiobooks, podcasts, comedy, poetry, and short stories.

Poshmark Competitors

poshmark-competitors
Poshmark is a social commerce marketplace where users can buy and sell new or used clothing. The company was founded in 2011 by Manish Chandra, Tracy Sun, Gautam Golwala, and Chetan Pungaliya. Poshmark is one of many companies looking to profit from the explosive growth in the second-hand clothing and resale industry, which is expected to be worth around $51 billion by 2023. Scores of women, in particular, are opting to sell their unwanted fashion items online instead of donating them to charity or thrift stores.

Afterpay Competitors

afterpay-competitors
Afterpay is an Australian fintech company operating in Australia, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand, and the United States.  Founded in 2014 by Nick Molnar and Anthony Eisen, the company enjoyed a first-mover advantage in the buy-now-pay-later (BNPL) space. Less than seven years later, the company reached 13.1 million active customers with gross sales amounting to $10.1 billion. Despite its success, some suggest the company has lost its edge in the buy-now-pay-later space with the emergence of several high-profile competitors exerting their influence and giving merchants more choice.

Carvana Competitors

carvana-competitors
Carvana is an online used car retailer with vending machines located around the United States. The company was founded in 2012 by Ryan Keeton, Ben Huston, and Ernest Garcia III. The company is the fastest growing online used car retailer in North America and was recently one of the youngest companies to be added to the Fortune 500 list. While Carvana is currently the only American company selling cars in vending machines, its growth and success have not gone unnoticed by other players. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the company’s major competitors.

Carvana Competitors

carvana-competitors
Carvana is an online used car retailer with vending machines located around the United States. The company was founded in 2012 by Ryan Keeton, Ben Huston, and Ernest Garcia III. The company is the fastest growing online used car retailer in North America and was recently one of the youngest companies to be added to the Fortune 500 list. While Carvana is currently the only American company selling cars in vending machines, its growth and success have not gone unnoticed by other players. In this article, we’ll take a look at some of the company’s major competitors.

GoodRx Competitors

goodrx-competitors
GoodRx is an American healthcare company known for its telemedicine platform and a website and mobile app that track prescription drug prices. As part of this service, the company makes drug coupons available for free to consumers. GoodRx was created by Trevor Bezdek, Doug Hirsch, and Scott Marlette. Hirsch, an early employee at both Yahoo and Facebook, got the idea for the company after picking up a prescription with private health insurance and still having to pay $450. Given the high variability in prices between different pharmacies, Hirsh went on a mission to make prescription drug prices more transparent and affordable for ordinary Americans. Revenue in the second quarter of 2021 amounted to $177 million with over 7.5 million app customers using the GoodRx app. While the company was the first to provide a comprehensive list of pharmacy drug prices, new players have entered the market. The rest of this article will be devoted to looking at the main GoodRx competitors.

DoorDash Competitors

DoorDash Competitors
DoorDash is an online food ordering and delivery platform founded by Tony Xu, Stanley Tang, Andy Fang, and Evan Moore in 2013. Together with its subsidiaries, DoorDash has a 56% market share in food delivery and a further 60% in the convenience delivery sector.

Pepsi Competitors

pepsi-competitors
In 1965, PepsiCo acquired Frito-Lay in what the chairmen of both companies called a “marriage made in heaven”. The resultant company transformed PepsiCo from a soft drink organization and set it on a path to becoming one of the world’s leading food and beverage companies.  Today, PepsiCo claims to operate in more than 200 countries and territories around the world with seven distinct divisions and many successful brands.

Coca-Cola Competitors

coca-cola-competitors
The Coca-Cola Company has 21 different billion-dollar brands or brands that generate more than $1 billion or more in revenue each year.  The company also sells its products in nearly every country in the world, with Cuba and North Korea the only two countries where it is not sold officially. What’s more, the Coca-Cola brand is worth $87.6 billion, making it one of the most valuable among all companies. Though these figures allow Coca-Cola to enjoy market dominance in many countries, the company is nevertheless subject to intense competition.

Disney Competitors

disney-competitors
Headquartered in Burbank, California, Disney has global reach and influence with its universally popular resorts, movies, streaming services, video games, and merchandise.  But as one of the largest media conglomerates in the world with a diverse range of products in multiple marketplaces, Disney is no stranger to competition. 

IBM Competitors

ibm-competitors
International Business Machines Corporation (IBM) is an American multinational technology company. It was founded in New York as the Computing-Tabulating-Recording Company in 1911 by Charles Ranlett Flint. IBM is a diverse company with a similarly diverse portfolio of products and services. It produces and sells hardware, middleware, and software. It also offers hosting and consultancy services in nanotechnology and mainframe computers. What’s more, IBM has a strong culture in research and development, filing the most U.S. patents of any business for the past 28 years.

Uber Competitors

uber-competitors

Starbucks Competitors

starbucks-competitors
Starbucks is a multinational coffee chain headquartered in Seattle, Washington. It was founded by Jerry Baldwin, Zev Siegl, and Gordon Bowker in 1971. From a single and very humble bean roasting store in Pike Place Market, the company is now a global giant operating almost 33,000 stores around the world. This large global footprint obviously increases the competition for Starbucks in many different markets. The coffee industry itself is also highly competitive, with established players including McDonald’s and Dunkin’ Donuts.

Boeing Competitors

boeing-competitors
Boeing is best known for designing and manufacturing commercial aircraft, but the company also produces helicopters, rockets, satellites, spacecraft, missiles, and telecommunications infrastructure. Founded in 1916 by William Boeing in Seattle, Washington, the company is one of the largest aerospace manufacturers and defense contractors in the world.

Google Competitors

google-competitors
While Google (now Alphabet) has been born as a search engine, it is now a diversified company, even though its core business remains search, as most of its revenues still come from Google, the search engine, and YouTube, the “video engine.” However, as a tech giant, which business is primarily based on advertising, the company does compete with Facebook, Twitter, Microsoft (with Bing), and Amazon (with e-commerce search and its advertising machine).

Peloton Competitors

peloton-competitors
Peloton is a media and exercise equipment company primarily making money making money via its fitness products. The idea for the company came from John Foley, who argued that technology could help time-poor individuals get a full workout at home. The company competes with other players like Bowflex, NordicTrack, Life Fitness, MYX Fitness.

IKEA Competitors

ikea-competitors
IKEA was founded in 1943 by Swedish businessman Ingvar Kamprad as a mail-order catalog business. The company is best known for selling affordable flat-pack furniture, but it also sells home accessories and kitchen appliances. Today, IKEA offers approximately 9,500 products across 445 stores in 52 countries. With such broad reach, IKEA is not immune to competition.

Airbnb Competitors

airbnb-competitors
The Airbnb story began in 2008 when two friends shared their accommodation with three travelers looking for a place to stay. Just over a decade later, it is estimated that the company now accounts for over 20% of the vacation rental industry. As a travel platform, Airbnb competes with other brands like Booking.com, VRBO, FlipKey, and given its massive amount of traffic from Google. Also, platforms like Google Travel can be considered potential competitors able to cannibalize part of Airbnb’s market.

Salesforce Competitors

salesforce-competitors
Salesforce is a cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) provider, allowing businesses to build meaningful and sustained relationships with their customers. With robust, customizable software that integrates with social media, Gmail, and Microsoft Outlook, the Salesforce CRM platform is rated highly among businesses of all shapes and sizes. Recent data has shown that the company has captured 19.5% of the global CRM market.

Shopify Competitors

shopify-competitors
In just fifteen short years, Shopify has grown from humble beginnings to become one of the fastest-growing eCommerce platforms online. The Shopify eCommerce solution is perhaps best suited to users who desire an easy, flexible and affordable starter solution for their online store. The provider now has upwards of 820,000 stores accounting for 20% of the total market share. However, the continued success of any company in the dynamic digital market is never guaranteed.

Netflix Competitors

netflix-competitors
Netflix is the largest streaming video subscription service in the world. Created by Reed Hastings and Marc Randolph in 1997, the company has revolutionized the video content subscription model with over 139 million subscribers in 190 countries. The success of Netflix is due to two factors. The first is a recommendation system that gives suggestions on what customers should watch based on their viewing history. The second is the vast catalog of content on offer – produced by third parties and by Netflix itself. These factors have resulted in Netflix competing against influential TV networks and film producers for viewership.

Nike Competitors

nike-competitors

YouTube Competitors

youtube-competitors
YouTube is the most popular online video platform, a hybrid between a video search engine and a social media platform with a continuous feed prompted by social interactions and engagement. In fact, the platform is so popular that YouTube.com is the second most visited website on the internet. After being acquired by Google in 2006 for $1.65 billion, the platform now boasts over 2 billion registered users. Collectively, these users upload 500 hours of video every minute. The platform competes with other video engines like Vimeo, Dailymotion, and social platforms like IGTV, TikTok, and Twitch.

Zoom Competitors

zoom-competitors
Zoom is a video platform, which enabled remote working. As such it competes with other large tech players like Google and Microsoft for the productivity space, and other startups like Slack and Go-To-Meetings.

Tesla Competitors

tesla-competitors
As an electric automaker and builder of sports cars and now trucks, Tesla’s competitors comprise companies like Ford, Mercedes-Benz, Porsche, Lamborghini, Audi, Rivian Lucid Motors, Toyota, and more. At the same time, Tesla is an electric energy production and storage company (SolarCity); it competes with Sunrun, SunPower, and Vivint Solar. And as an autonomous driving company, it competes with companies like Zoox, Waymo, and Baidu with the self-driving software.

Amazon Competitors

amazon-competitors
Amazon is a consumer e-commerce platform with a diversified business model spanning across e-commerce, cloud, advertising, streaming, and more. Over the years, Amazon acquired several companies. As it operates across several industries, Amazon has a wide range of competitors across each of those industries. For instance, Amazon E-commerce competes with Shopify, Wix, Google, Etsy, eBay, BigCommerce.

Read Next: Business Competition, Direct vs. Indirect Competition

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