14 DAY TRIAL // A new report coming from a firm called Baird Equity Research says that until 2014 specialist game retail chain GameStop will grow its overall sales to 1.5 billion dollars by using its brick and mortar stores and its new digitally oriented strategy.
Analyst Colin Sebastian says that the executives working at GameStop see a big potential for growth in the digitally powered market and hope to take some market share away from Steam, the Valve-created service that dominates that market space at the moment.
This will be done by aggressively pushing Impulse forward, the service that GameStop acquired from Stardock earlier during the year.
At the moment a number of customers are picking up downloadable content from GameStop, but the company needs to sell full games via Impulse in order to achieve significant growth.
The report also seems to confirm that the upcoming Battlefield 3 first-person shooter from developer DICE and publisher Electronic Arts will not be sold directly through Steam, with GameStop interested in marketing the game aggressively in order to draw gamers to its stores and to Impulse.
The report says that, “The upcoming EA title Battlefield 3 will be sold as a download through GameStop, but not through Steam. Given Steam's dominance - and insistence on users downloading a Steam client application - publishers are likely to be receptive to a competitive alternative.”
The report also says that the executives at GameStop are not expecting any new hardware from either Microsoft or Sony before 2014, although the exact launch dates might change significantly if the coming launch of the Nintendo made Wii U platform, set for 2012, will be a commercial success.
The profit for GameStop has come in at 80.4 million dollars for the first fiscal quarter of the year, with digital game sales seeing an increase of more than 50 percent during that period.