GameStop has been on a wild ride since reaching meme status, and recently the company has been dabbling in Web3 technologies like NFTs and crypto. More recently, it has also been firing employees without much explanation. On Thursday, GameStop announced an unspecified number of layoffs internally — reportedly including some at the popular publication Game Informer — and publicly revealed that it had fired its CFO with a brief press release.
GameStop CEO Matt Furlong announced the round of layoffs in a memo obtained by CNBC and Kotaku. It’s not entirely clear how many people are affected or in which divisions, though Furlong wrote in the memo that “we’re making a number of layoffs to help us keep things simple and work nimbly with the right talent in place.” The layoffs “appear to be” are centered at the company’s headquarters in Grapevine, Texas, according to Kotaku.
Despite the fact that cryptocurrency isn’t doing so hot right now, it looks like GameStop is staking some of its future on its blockchain group – this is mentioned in the first line of Furlong’s note:
Change will be constant as we grow our trading business and launch new products through our blockchain group. After major investments in staff, technology, inventory and supply chain infrastructure over the past 18 months, our focus is on achieving sustainable profitability. This means eliminating overhead and operating with an owner-intensive mentality.
GameStop also says it’s making a “significant investment” in its store employees, showing it still believes its stores are important, too. “These people are, in many ways, the heart of GameStop,” Furlong wrote. “We will be sharing details about this investment in the coming weeks.”
The company publicly announced the “termination of employment” of CFO Michael Recupero. He will be replaced by Diana Saadeh-Jajeh, who was the company’s chief accountant.
According to Axios, the layoffs also affected Game Informer, which is owned by the video game retailer, although it was unclear how many people were affected. Some tweets from employees are not positive.
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