In what might be the most chaotic "hold my controller" moment in gaming history, GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen is being accused of auctioning off rare and historically significant games from the Game Informer vault on eBay, according to a report from Kotaku. The apparent motive? Funding an acquisition that, by all accounts, he couldn't actually afford.
For the uninitiated, Game Informer maintained a legendary collection of games over its decades of operation - the kind of stuff that makes collectors weep into their limited-edition steelbooks. These weren't just dusty old cartridges gathering XP in a storage room. They were pieces of gaming history.
Cohen, who has positioned himself as some kind of meme-stock prophet since his GameStop days, apparently decided the best way to bankroll a new business move was to liquidate what wasn't really his to liquidate. It's giving "sold the family heirloom to fund a crypto play" energy, except the family in this case was an entire gaming publication.
The accusations come amid the already messy backdrop of Game Informer's closure in 2024, which left longtime staff without jobs and fans mourning the loss of one of gaming media's most iconic outlets. Finding out that its vault may have been quietly auctioned off on eBay - the same platform where you find bootleg controllers and suspiciously cheap "genuine" Pokemon cards - adds an extra layer of insult to injury.
According to Kotaku's reporting, the games that ended up listed appear to be consistent with what would have been housed in Game Informer's collection. Whether Cohen had the legal authority to sell them, and whether any of it was properly disclosed, are the kinds of questions that lawyers tend to get very interested in.
This whole saga is the real-life equivalent of a player selling their entire inventory to buy a weapon they can't even equip yet. Bold strategy, Ryan. Bold strategy.
The full breakdown of the accusations is available over at Kotaku, and it is, to put it gently, a lot.
