Would You Use Gamestop To Submit PSA Cards?

Gamestop has recently made a huge play in the sports card market. They are selling cards and exclusive repacks. Now the company is making a big push in the world of PSA card submissions, aiming to make it easier than ever for collectors to grade their cards.

While they are not the first company you would think of as the next big player in the hobby, it is also not that shocking, as the line between cards and games has blurred in recent years.

After all, a new player is entering the market every day. So, will this move have any consequences for the marketplace? Find out in our overview how Gamestop makes a sports card play.

What’s new with Gamestop sports cards?

Gamestop is not new to the sports card world. You can buy and sell slabs on their website for a while now. But now they are moving into the space more aggressively. They have teamed up with controversial breakers Backyard Breaks to produce repacks. You can buy them on the Backyard Breaks website, although they are sold out.

You can buy an increasing number of sports card brands nationwide at Gamestop branches, but GameStop is expanding its sports card reach. Gamestop has also announced that they will organize group submissions to PSA.

Once a company becomes heavily involved in the sports card space, it tends to continue and spin-off new initiatives. The company’s brass is willing to invest a significant amount of resources in this.

Now Gamestop started to accept PSA submissions on October 9th, a story that we originally broke in early October.

This is the logical next step that they have entered the selling graded cards space so heavily. But would you trust this corporation that sells video games with your most expensive cards?

The best way to figure that out is through a deep dive into this company and its previous dealings with the hobby. So, let’s do that.

What Is Gamestop?

Gamestop is primarily known as a video game store. It is located in literally any mall in America. It has 4,169 stores worldwide and 2,915 in the United States. The company is valued at about 9 billion dollars, roughly half as valuable as Fanatics for those keeping score.

It was founded in Dallas in 1984 under Babbage’s, switching to Gamestop in 1999. In the early 21st century, it became a massive player in the sports card industry. However, the move to online sales, mainly through Steam, severely hurt its revenue stream in the 2010s.

Since then, it has slowly shrunk in size. However, it enjoyed renewed attention in 2021, when Gamestop stock was at the center of a highly publicized short squeeze. A massive buy, inspired initially by Reddit users (yes, really), saw the stock explode from a value of $17.25 to well over $500 per share. It has since returned to its normal value and sells at $21 per share at the time of writing.

Over the years, the company has tried its hand at various other industries and invested to increase its profile and revenue, particularly in the cell phone space. However, those attempts have failed quite spectacularly.

The company is currently ranked 577th on the Fortune 500 list. That raises the question, why is it on a 500 list if it lists more than 500 companies? Those are the tough questions we ask at Cardlines.

Grading cards at PSA via GameStop

On October 9th, GameStop began a soft launch of PSA grading submissions, which aims to make it easier to submit cards to PSA for grading. You will not be able to submit currency, coins, or packs through the program at this time.

The cost will be $16 for TCG submissions and $20 for non-TCG submissions for a guaranteed 9 week return time.

The GameStop card grading page boosts “no submission form, no card minimum and no subscription required.” From the page, you can find a participating store nearby.

According to AllHallows on Twitter, collectors should “be prepared to pay upgrade fees for cards that get a higher value from PSA.”

The reaction of GameStop submitting cards to PSA has been mostly positive with some collectors noting that making the submission process easier for collectors will be a welcome change, especially at an attractive price.

Detractors of the news have questioned whether they want GameStop, a middle man, handling their potentially valuable cards.

Buying and selling slabs through GameStop

In May 2024, Gamestop announced it would begin buying and selling graded cards. At first glance, selling cards at a store in the mall specializing in video games doesn’t make much sense. But they have a vast infrastructure of stores that are conveniently located. You can get money for your cards easily and quickly without selling them online and shipping them.

They only accept PSA 8, 9, and 10 with the Lighthouse label. You can receive cash or in-store credit for them on-site at Gamestop stores. That was a smart move on their part. This means that the company only deals with higher-quality cards.

Therefore, the risks of investing are small, and there is an almost certain reward. They offer a higher return on store credit than cash, which is another way Gamestop profits from this exchange.

There is one particularly appealing element to selling cards at Gamestop. If you are a member of the Gamestop Pro program, you get an extra 10% off the cards you sell. That can make a big difference, especially with particularly valuable cards.

It is a no-brainer if you already have a Gamestop Pro membership. However, it only costs $25 annually and is therefore worth considering either way.

In addition, according to the terms on the Gamestop website, “When buying graded cards, Pro Members get 15% off and have the option to use $5 Monthly Rewards or points-based Online Rewards for additional savings. Pros can also earn points for buying graded cards (20 points per $1 spent).”

When trading graded cards, Pros get 10% extra trade credit.

It’s worth noting that Gamestop is not a great avenue to sell your top cards. They will not offer you more than $1500 in cash or in-store credit for any card, regardless of its market value.

Will Gamestop do a good job buying and selling slabs?

The best way to predict whether the company’s new moves will work is to examine the quality of its past work. So, I looked up some reviews of its service of buying and selling graded slabs.

The YouTube account Cool Factor Cards tried doing so. The host brought a bunch of cards, some of which are pretty basic and others that are hard to find comps for. After trying to sell cards to them, the host called it a “disastrous trip to Gamestop.” And it is easy to see why he felt that way.

They very carefully check to make sure that the PSA slabs are authentic. Then they make offers that are not very attractive. Here are the cards that Cool Factor Cards offered, how much they were worth at the time, and what Gamestop offered to pay for them:

• A 2019 Panini Mosaic LeBron James Base (PSA 10) – value $15 – offer $1 store credit or 90 cents cash. They said the card was not of interest to them because it had a population of 6,000 at PSA.
• A 2019 Panini Mosaic LeBron James Pink Cam (PSA 10) – value $30 – offer $16 store credit or 14 cents cash.
• 2021 Panini Prizm Peyton Manning Red Prizm (PSA 9) – value $50 for a raw – no offer. There were no recent comps on the card.
• 2020 Panini Flux LaMelo Ball Atmosphere – Exosphere (PSA 10) – value $80 – offer $37 store credit or $34 cash.
• 1996 Bowman’s Best Mike Piazza (PSA 9) – Value $25 – offer $13 store credit or $14 cash.
• 2022 2 and 3 Spencer Torkelson RPA (PSA 10) – Value $40-50 – no offer.

The offers they give seem to be pretty low. They tend to be about half of the market comps. Meanwhile, cards with either very large populations or very few comps are of little to no interest to Gamestop.

So, this is not a particularly useful service. They will give you bad offers for the cards they want and have no interest in very common or rare cards.

Gamestop making a sports cards play of selling repacks

Gamestop has been selling a brand of repacks together with Backyard Breaks. If you have been living under a rock for the last few years, let us remind you that this outfit has a somewhat problematic history in the hobby.

Here is a partial list of the scandals they have been involved in. They did not provide an expensive card, a Trevor Lawrence gold Kaboom! to be precise, to a customer who won the card in a giveaway. Since then, they have also been accused of receiving marked boxes from Panini.

Then, they were caught withholding cards from customers again. Then, a former employee of the company was caught stealing from them. There is always something with this outfit. Nonetheless, they remain a fairly popular breaking outfit.

Considering Backyard Breaks’ lousy history, we question who will want to buy repacks produced with Gamestop. But since they are sold out, someone must be doing that.

What do these repacks include?

There is, at minimum, a PSA 8 included in every box. The biggest selling point for the repacks is the exclusive Wemby cards

Still, these repacks are not setting the world on fire. Some have been complaining about their content.

For example, the Sports Card Nonsense Podcast folks said the following about the product: “Everyone who ordered these for stores, and they say it went out nationwide, got one or two. They got these repacks, but everyone only got one or two. They’re selling for $55, but every box I saw, granted not every single one, but a majority of them, did not have cards in them worth the money you were paying for.”

Will the Gamestop sports card expansion work?

There needs to be more consensus about the meaning of this move. Jesse Gibson of the Sports Card Nonsense podcast believes they will ultimately replace local card shops.

He said, “Gamestop is the future of card shops in America. I think they are the corporatization of card shops. Just like Topps and Fanatics is the corporatization of the card hobby. I believe that is when many people will start moving more and more products over to those shops.

They are also beginning to sell sports cards because they are already selling many non-sports cards. And now they are getting into repacks. We know they are already buying and selling graded cards. It seems that they are making a real play.

The evidence from their sports card slab selling experiment is mixed. On the one hand, they take that element of their business surprisingly seriously. They use algorithms and methods that seem relatively sophisticated to determine what they are buying and for what price.

Gamestop has their act together enough to brave the threat of Steam and other platforms for purchasing video games online.

The final word on Gamestop getting into sports cards

Keeping up with all the actors entering the sports card space is hard. The amount of money flying around in the hobby is not too surprising. However, most efforts are doomed to fail in a market that tends towards monopolies.

We increasingly see a handful of companies, namely PSA, Fanatics, and eBay, managing to consolidate the vast majority of hobby activity while everyone else gets the scraps. Even big players like Target and Walmart are increasingly on the outside of the big money. Therefore, it doesn’t appear that a more minor player like Gamestop has much of a chance.

But that may be misleading. Gamestop is trying to act as a sort of poor man’s local cards store for communities that do not have one. That is not a wrong approach to take. There are 1,662 sports card stores in the US. Gamestop has almost twice as many locations.

Therefore, they can act as a center for buying cards, selling cards, and submitting cards to PSA in places where card stores don’t exist or are hard to reach. They can do so at little expense while focusing most of their business elsewhere. So, it adds to their bottom line without taking any serious risks.

Because Gamestop is taking a relatively low-risk strategy and one with limited ambitions, there is a good chance it will pay off. The company is aware of what it can and can’t do.

It buys cards that it knows it can flip profitably, sells repacks that it knows there is a market for, and will submit submissions in places where the expertise is lacking. Like it or not, Gamestop is part of the hobby and is here to stay.