> I'm not into the gaming community but I suspect there's a big contigent in the pre-teen/teen age range
Neither am I, but based on strong anecdotal evidence from every trip I've made to Micro Center in the last couple of years, I suspect your suspicion is accurate. Especially when I did a custom PC build a couple years back, and had to visit the support department due to my motherboard needing a firmware update to run with the CPU I'd picked - I found myself all but constantly tripping over infants in Fortnite T-shirts who, I assume, had talked their parents into spending thousands of dollars on top-tier gaming rigs with the argument that it would help them develop a marketable skill.
Good on them, I say; at a similar age, I did much the same. (Athlon 600 and a Voodoo3 3000! Back when Alienware was still an upstart doing white-box builds...) But, yes, all of that's to say that I think you're absolutely right, and GameStop would be very well advised to pivot in a similar direction to what you describe. They'd need to poach some expertise from Micro Center, which would probably be expensive, and while I suspect they'd get good bulk pricing on components, there'd still be significant capex there too. But there are a lot of places in the US where GameStop is and Micro Center isn't.
Neither am I, but based on strong anecdotal evidence from every trip I've made to Micro Center in the last couple of years, I suspect your suspicion is accurate. Especially when I did a custom PC build a couple years back, and had to visit the support department due to my motherboard needing a firmware update to run with the CPU I'd picked - I found myself all but constantly tripping over infants in Fortnite T-shirts who, I assume, had talked their parents into spending thousands of dollars on top-tier gaming rigs with the argument that it would help them develop a marketable skill.
Good on them, I say; at a similar age, I did much the same. (Athlon 600 and a Voodoo3 3000! Back when Alienware was still an upstart doing white-box builds...) But, yes, all of that's to say that I think you're absolutely right, and GameStop would be very well advised to pivot in a similar direction to what you describe. They'd need to poach some expertise from Micro Center, which would probably be expensive, and while I suspect they'd get good bulk pricing on components, there'd still be significant capex there too. But there are a lot of places in the US where GameStop is and Micro Center isn't.
Granted, I think the days of the Internet café are over for good in the US, so as a hangout hub I don't see it working. But as a place to go to get custom gaming builds plus support, peripherals, and upsells for same, I think there's real potential there, especially if you're also selling all the consoles and appurtenances thereunto. And most especially if doing all this puts you in the right place to be on the leading edge of the consumer VR boom, when that finally comes...