Hold up, GameStop’s stock is up… and for once, it’s not because Ryan Cohen tweeted a blurry photo of a Hot Wheels car next to a Michael Saylor bobblehead. No, Sir. This time, the original meme stock actually did something wild: it made real money. And not “we paid the light bill” money… more like “we more than 10x’d last year’s profit” money.

In the second quarter, GameStop pulled in $168.6 million in net income, or 31 cents per share. That’s compared to just $14.8 million (or 4 cents) in the same quarter a year ago. Even if you strip out some one-time items, they still cleared 25 cents per share, blowing past Wall Street’s 15-cent estimate. So this wasn’t another case of the stock going vertical because Reddit found a new conspiracy in the shadows of a Cohen meme. GameStop actually executed. Meaning, real operations. Real revenue. Real margins. (I’m just as surprised as you are.)

Now, where did all this money come from? Well, this is where it gets interesting… and honestly, a little ironic. The same company that used to make its money selling scratched Call of Duty discs is now cashing in on collectibles and hardware. Revenue came in at $972.2 million, up 22% year-over-year, with hardware and accessories raking in $592.1 million, a 31% increase. That category now makes up nearly 61% of GameStop’s total business. 

(Source: Wall Street Journal)

At the same time, collectibles revenue jumped 63% to $227.6 million, meaning nearly a quarter of the company’s business now revolves around people buying gaming merch and possibly a third Master Sword for their wall. Software, on the other hand, shrank like a wool sweater in a hot dryer… down 27%, now just 15.7% of the revenue pie. So essentially, we’re watching the slow death of GameStop’s OG business model, while its Hot Topic side hustle thrives.

A big driver behind the hardware boom was the Nintendo Switch 2, which dropped in June and instantly became the best-selling console in both June and July. It reportedly sold more than 2 million units in the U.S. alone by early August. So yes, when your store is one of the few places still selling physical hardware, and that hardware happens to be Nintendo’s newest cash cow, good things tend to happen.

But here’s where it gets weird… in a very GameStop kind of way. The company also revealed it now holds $528.6 million in Bitcoin. That’s after buying 4,710 coins earlier this year in May and June. So now we’ve got the meme stock that helped kick off the retail trader revolution pivoting into a half-billion-dollar crypto position. Michael Saylor probably just slow-clapped in approval. Add that to the $8.7 billion in cash they’re sitting on (nearly double what they had a year ago) and GameStop suddenly doesn’t look like a joke anymore. With a market cap around $10.5 billion, that’s an absurd amount of liquidity.

And because it wouldn’t be a GameStop story without some chaos candy for the fans, the company announced a special dividend in the form of warrants. Every 10 shares gets you one warrant to buy another share at $32. With the stock trading around $24, that’s either a savvy incentive or a coupon you’ll forget about until 2026. Either way, it got the internet talking about it (which was the whole point).

(Source: Investing.com)

For GameStop, this quarter showed something we haven’t seen in a while... they don’t just have one pitch. Turns out, they can throw more than just the meme-stock fastball. This time, they didn’t need to whip Reddit into a frenzy or drop cryptic tweets to get the stock moving. They just quietly lobbed a curveball over the plate in the form of cold, hard earnings… and for once, the numbers actually made sense.

Whether this kind of momentum sticks around is anyone’s guess (this is GameStop, after all) but today? They’re not only back. They’re profitable, they’re crypto-loaded, and they might be the only company in America that can sell a Pikachu plushie and $528 million worth of Bitcoin in the same quarter… and still somehow get a nod of approval from Wall Street.

At the time of publishing this article, Stocks.News holds positions in Gamestop as mentioned in the article.