CEO GameStop Datang Dengan Rencana Untuk Membeli eBay Di Toilet, Ingin Menjadi Penjual Kembali Barang Game Digital
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GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen is trying to buy the popular auction site eBay for $56 billion. He's now laid out a new angle of his vision, and it involves video games. In a recent interview, Cohen said one previously unannounced part of his plan to help eBay return to growth--if he can successfully take it over-is by creating a marketplace for digital gaming items. eBay has already flatly rejected Cohen's proposal to buy the company, saying it was "neither credible nor attractive."
He said on the All-In Interview podcast that eBay is currently a market-leader for physical collectibles, but not digital ones. He said he's identified a gap in the market, and he believes the returns could be massive.
"I would extend that into digital collectibles. If you look at all of these in-game items from AAA titles that people are accumulating--skins, weapons, all of these things--taking eBay and building a marketplace where you can provide liquidity for in-game digital items," he said. "Essentially, it's what NFTs could have ... people thought they were. But ultimately they had no real utility. In-game items actually have real utility."
He said physical collectibles like art and trading cards are "ego" plays. The markets for these items are massive, he said, but the items have no utility beyond telling people that you have them and owning something rare.
Video game in-game items, meanwhile, have real utility, he said.
"There is no marketplace that is providing liquidity for them. I would use eBay to provide liquidity for in-game digital items. I believe that addressable market could be much larger than eBay's marketplace on physical items. No one is doing it. This should already exist. It's crazy that it doesn't exist," he said.
Existing marketplaces like Player Auctions and Gameflip offer some of these services, but eBay has significantly larger scale and brand recognition.
Counter-Strike skins are known to sell for huge premiums online. Meanwhile, people have been selling their high-level World of Warcraft gaming accounts on eBay for a long time already, but Cohen is seemingly talking about something else here. In the case of Counter-Strike skins, these are sold within Steam (where Valve gets a cut). If Cohen is proposing something like a marketplace where people can sell Call of Duty or Fortnite skins, that would no doubt require developers to provide permission and infrastructure to support such a thing.
Cohen did not get into specifics regarding his plan to pull this off, but there does appear to be a significant market for digital skins. The state of New York sued Valve earlier this year, and in its case, it claimed the market for Counter-Strike skins was beyond $4 billion as of 2025. The lawsuit also brought up the very kind of idea that Cohen wants to address, as New York Attorney General Letitia James specifically called out the "ease of liquidating items through third-party marketplaces."
The other two parts of Cohen's plan for eBay, should he successfully take it over, is to cut costs massively to immediately improve earnings (like he did at GameStop) and to expand further into "live commerce." Popular in Asia and on TikTok, live commerce is the term for video where a content creator or store hosts a livestream to sell their products, giving viewers the ability to purchase items without leaving the video. eBay already owns and operates eBay Live, which does some of this, but Cohen said eBay has not properly managed or invested in it.
Also in the interview, Cohen said he came up with the idea to buy eBay while he was on the toilet (he did not elaborate further) and said buying GameStop was a bad idea in hindsight. Cohen said his original strategy for growing GameStop was to make it more like his previous company, the pet food company Chewy that he sold to Petsmart for $3.35 billion.
"That was the wrong strategy," he said, noting that when he became CEO, he changed plans and went into "maniacal cost-cutting mode" and doubling down on pre-owned and collectibles.
In other news, Cohen recently canceled his $35 billion pay plan to focus on the eBay takeover. Also in the interview, Cohen revealed that he's pouring $500 million of his own money into his bid for eBay.
Sumber: GameSpot