GameStop To Close 250 Stores, Will Open 60-70 New Stores This Year

The rise of Steam and other digital distribution services have certainly been hurting the physical media sales of PC games, and the online retailers are slowly sucking the life out of brick-and-mortar stores, especially video game specialty shops like GameStop. The company announced today that they will close down 250 locations this year, but will open up 60-70 new stores during the same time period.

GameStop CFO Rob Lloyd spoke at the Goldman Sachs Technology and Internet Conference today and announced the news that the company would be opening and closing various stores around the world, 200 of which will be shut down in the US alone. Plus, Lloyd also announced that GameStop has acquired 40 shut-down GAME stores in France.

According to Lloyd, GameStop will make more money by closing unprofitable stores and moving customers to other nearby stores that have potential of more foot traffic and sales. Overall, GameStop expects to see a reduction of 2% to its physical store locations after it's all said and done, which isn't a huge at all.

While GameStop expects to close down a number of stores, it doesn't seem too bad considering that they plan to open up new stores in other locations. Granted, they'll only be opening 60-70 new stores, as opposed to shutting down 250 of them, but it seems that the company is experimenting with ways to keep itself afloat, which could either pay off in the future, or turn out to be bad news at some point.

[via CVG]