What was GameStop called before 1999?
The chain that became GameStop opened in Dallas in 1984 under a different sign. Two Harvard Business School classmates, Gary Kusin and James McCurry, started a software store called Babbage's in the NorthPark Center mall and named it after Charles Babbage, the mathematician who designed the first mechanical computer.
Ross Perot, the Texas businessman and later presidential candidate, was an early investor.
Babbage's sold boxed software for home computers years before console games paid the rent. It merged with Software Etc. in the mid 1990s, passed through the collapse of the NeoStar Retail Group, and ended up owned by Barnes & Noble.
The GameStop name arrived in 1999, fifteen years after the first store opened. By then the business had found the model it would ride for two decades: buy used games cheap, sell them again at a markup, and keep a wall of new releases by the door.
How fast has the store count fallen since 2024?
In February 2024, GameStop ran 2,915 stores in the United States. Twelve months later it ran 2,325, part of a worldwide total of 3,203 that also covered Canada, Australia and Europe.
Then came the year that redrew the map. GameStop closed 727 stores in the United States during fiscal 2025, the year that ended on January 31, 2026, and finished with 1,598 US stores standing.
That is a cut of 1,317 stores, or 45 percent of the US footprint, in 24 months. Nearly half the counters where a generation traded in a stack of discs for store credit are gone, and most closed quietly rather than with a liquidation sale.
The shape of the decline is familiar to anyone who watched Blockbuster fall from a store in every strip mall to a single location in Oregon. The difference is the speed. GameStop shed more than a thousand American stores in two years while still opening its doors every morning.
Which GameStop stores closed in January 2026?
More than 470 locations across 43 states went dark in January 2026 alone, one of the largest single waves in the chain's history.
GameStop did not publish a list. Reporters assembled one by watching the company's own store locator flip hundreds of addresses to closed, which is how shoppers in Ohio, Florida and Virginia found out their store was on it.
Investors had been warned in general terms. In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, GameStop said it would close "a significant number of additional stores in fiscal 2025", the year that ran to January 31, 2026.
The damage was spread thin rather than concentrated. Forty-three states lost at least one location in that January, which is why the closure list read like a national retreat instead of an exit from one weak region. A mall that kept its GameStop through 2025 had no particular reason to expect it would keep it through 2026.
Does GameStop still sell many games?
Not many. In the first quarter of fiscal 2026, collectibles, a category that now leans on graded trading cards and Pokemon singles, brought in 41.8 percent of GameStop's revenue. Hardware and accessories accounted for close to 40 percent.
Video game software, the product the store is named for, is under 12 percent of the business, chief executive Ryan Cohen said in 2026.
Cohen went further than the numbers. After Sony said it would stop producing discs for games released after January 2028, he called physical software "totally irrelevant" to GameStop's results, which is a strange sentence from the man running the largest game store chain in the country.
That leaves the modern GameStop as a trading floor for cards, figures, consoles and controllers with a games shelf attached. Anyone who wants to play Sega Genesis games in 2026 is better served by a specialist than by a mall counter.
Why did GameStop shut down Game Informer?
On August 2, 2024, GameStop closed Game Informer and laid off the entire staff the same day. The magazine had run for 33 years and was the last large print games magazine in the United States.
The farewell posted in its place said "it is with a heavy heart that we announce the closure of Game Informer".
GameStop gave no public reason. The timing lined up with the cost cutting that was emptying hundreds of stores at the same time, and the magazine was an expense that did not sell a controller.
The bigger loss was the archive. The Game Informer website was replaced by the farewell note, and decades of reviews and features went offline with it. The title has since come back under different ownership and is no longer part of GameStop.
Readers who followed the slow hollowing of RadioShack will recognize the sequence: cut the parts that made the store worth a visit, then measure the visits.
Is it worth walking into a GameStop in 2026?
GameStop is still in business. It operated 1,598 stores in the United States as of January 31, 2026, plus locations in Canada, Australia and Europe, and it has told investors it does not expect to close a significant number of stores in fiscal 2026. The company now describes the remaining footprint as part of its logistics network rather than as a chain of game shops.
So the answer people search for is yes, with a condition attached. Your nearest GameStop may be gone even though the company is not, and checking the store locator before driving over is a reasonable habit in 2026.
Inside, the trade counter is still the center of the store, but what crosses it has changed. Cards get graded, consoles get valued, and the wall of new releases keeps shrinking because fewer of them ship on a disc at all.
Where to buy retro games now
Used shelves thinned out along with the store count, so the dependable route for older cartridges and discs is a specialist retro dealer rather than a mall chain. Stone Age Gamer stocks tested cartridges, repair parts and flash carts for the consoles GameStop stopped carrying years ago.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is GameStop going out of business?
No. GameStop is still operating in 2026, although it closed 727 stores in the United States during the fiscal year that ended January 31, 2026, including more than 470 in January 2026. The company has told investors it does not expect to close a significant number of additional stores in fiscal 2026.
How many GameStop stores are left?
GameStop had 1,598 stores in the United States as of January 31, 2026, down from 2,915 in February 2024. It also runs stores in Canada, Australia and Europe, which brought the worldwide total to 3,203 as of February 2025.
Who owns GameStop now?
No parent company owns GameStop. It is publicly traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker GME and is run by chief executive Ryan Cohen. The Babbage's and Barnes & Noble chapters of its ownership ended decades before the 2026 store closures.