this post was submitted on 23 Apr 2025
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I still don't understand why people are so obsessed with gamestop.
it killed all the good game stores.
its exploitative
it doesnt pay shit for trade ins.. especially when you consider what they sell the resultant game for.
and it treats employees like shit.
I genuinely cant understand why stockbros are so fucking obsessed with artificially pumping this shit up with their obsessive memeing for literally years, nor do I understand how it hasnt been investigated as a blatant stock manipulation.
PS: I love how everytime capitalism does something horrible, right wingers come in and are all like "thats like living under communism/socialism/whateverism", completely seriously.
It was actually a bit of legit class warfare. The institutional investors and billionaires were shorting GME so much that they were overexposed, and when u/DeepFuckingValue on Reddit spotted and shared it tons of regular middle-class retail investors all piled in to collectively fuck over the billionaires by pumping the price knowing that the short positions would still have to be filled. Probably some billionaires made money too, but for the most part is was a "regular folk vs Wall Street" affair.
They literally hauled u/DeepFuckingValue up in front of a Congressional Inquiry for pointing out on Reddit that a stock was oversubscribed, which is more than they've done for the many questionable insider stock purchases made by politicians and their families in recent years. Indeed, that's a big part of why the story won't go away, because it very publicly proved that the rules only apply if you're not connected.
That’s the big point there. Idk if it was really the “little guys” who benefited - mostly people who had the money to invest. But it proved how fucking arbitrary and stupid and meaningless the stock market is.
We’re told that rich people earned their money through hard work - the guy I knew who put his money on GME for the lols and made bank earned more money by doing nothing than I made working 60+ hours a week as a teacher.
Someone with $50k spare to play the markets has $50,000 more than someone living paycheck-to-paycheck, and $999,950,000 less than a billionaire. The "little guys" in this story are the ones who don't have "buy a politician" money.
I realize that first $50k is super important to your day-to-day life and conquering that second tier of Maslow's hierarchy and all, but in class war terms if you start drawing the lines at someone with a nicer car than you, that's how we end up with Stalinism, which I don't think anyone wants.
It's the only game store in many places, and a social hub for people who see being a "gamer" as a core part of their identity. Many of them are too young to remember a time when other game stores existed.
who the fuck is hanging around a gamestop socially? That sounds like a great way to get caught up between a disgruntled employee and a customer pissed off at being offered 40 cents total for 18 games.
I don't think you understand how much the GameStonk hype is completely divorced from the actual business of GameStop, especially years after the initial short squeeze hype. The people who are still into the stock hype are into some QAnon levels of conspiracy theories and messianic prophecies about the stock. It may as well be a religious cult at this point.
i mean its always been that, from day 1.
They think hedge funds are still shorting it, and that if they hold long enough they will default.