Summer Game Mess and GameStop's Pokémon Pivot
It’s showcase season—but instead of excitement, Laine and Joost are left asking: who is any of this for?
This week in UNBOXING, your two favorite co-hosts tackle the fragmented, glitzy, and increasingly baffling landscape of summer gaming events. From Summer Game Fest to the Xbox Showcase to Sony’s State of Play, they unravel the corporate spectacle to find... well, mostly trailers, brand maintenance, and vibes. Joost offers a history lesson on the fall of E3 and the rise of direct-to-stream pageantry, while Laine wonders whether trailer-based announcement culture has any cultural or consumer value left at all.
They dig into the aesthetic and strategic contrasts between Xbox and PlayStation, from Xbox’s awkward rebranding of its latest handheld, the ROG Ally, as a “portable PC” (and during Pride month, no less!) to Sony’s oddly muted presence. Laine delivers a spicy observation of the Xbox Ally’s ad campaign—which touts the device as a fever-dream induced techno-fetish object with zero gameplay—putting it up against Nintendo’s cheerful, people-centered original Switch ad campaign design.
In the second half of the show, we reflect on why GameStop is in the news again—no, not for games, but for pivoting to Pokémon cards and amassing a war chest of Bitcoin. Laine and Joost break down the company's transformation from cultural retailer to financial speculation engine, and the bizarre logic of meme stocks, vibes-based strategy, and what happens when a once-central node of gaming culture becomes just another shell company with six billion in cash and no discernible purpose.
Is this the future of retail? Is Ryan Cohen just very lucky? And should we be worried that GameStop's latest "strategy" might actually work? Laine raises alarm bells about the risks this pivot poses to local card and hobby stores, while Joost marvels at how late capitalism turns every brand into an investment vehicle—whether it makes sense or not.
Rounding out the episode: Broadway reviews, the perils of voting when left-handed, and the usual dose of pwns and owns—Joost roasting the lazy executive puff pieces in the Financial Times, Laine’s concerns about the future of the WNBA, considering the recent op-ed on the privatization of sports fandoms.
If you came for games, stay for the structural analysis—because nothing says “summer fun” like late-stage capitalism, console identity crises, and Pokémon-fueled stock speculation…right?
Listen in!