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Posted by Scotty
on Monday, 04 May 2009
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 We all know GameStop has a strong position in the retail videogame market, but have you ever wanted to satisfy your obsessive compulsion to know just how much control they hold while using quantifiable numbers? Then allow Gamasutra to come to the rescue, as a comprehensive report they've put together concludes the retail chain owns about 21 percent of the U.S. new console hardware and software market.
A couple of words in that last sentence are worth a little more attention -- note that these conclusions are specifically for new (not used) sales, and for console sales only. Gamasutra reached this figure by comparing NPD sales reports of all new game and console sales revenues across a full year, with consistent data that shows about 60% of GameStop's revenue comes from new game and console sales -- therefore, they got a pretty good idea of how much of the total revenue GameStop accounts for alone. However, sales of PC games and accessories are grouped with too many other sources of revenue in GameStop's financial reports, and are therefore too difficult to isolate for the purposes of this report.
Still, to consider that one retail chain owns 1/5 of the U.S. console market is pretty remarkable; as Gamasutra notes, this marketshare "defines the power [GameStop] wields when working with publishers." And just how did GameStop reach this power? The obvious way: sheer market saturation. Comparing the number of GameStop stores to U.S. Census data, Gamasutra concluded there's 1.4 GameStop stores for every 100,000 people in the country.
[Via 1UP]
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