Gamestop Fires CFO, Lays Off Staff Across Departments To Eliminate ‘Excess Costs’

Video game and consumer electronics company Gamestop fired its Chief Financial Officer Mike Recupero and announced layoffs across different departments as the company seeks to invest in a more digital environment. It is unclear how many workers were affected by the layoffs.

In a memo to employees Thursday that was obtained by CNBC, CEO Matt Furlong said Gamestop had to take the necessary steps to drive growth and catch up with a digitalizing videogame industry. “This means eliminating excess costs and operating with an intense owner’s mentality,” he said, adding that “everyone in the organization must become even more hands-on and embrace a heightened level of accountability for results.”

Furlong also revealed in the memo that the company has made more than 600 corporate hires since 2021 and the first half of 2022. He said Thursday’s layoffs were meant “to help us keep things simple and operate nimbly with the right talent in place.”

The Gamestop CEO went on to announce the departure of Recupero, who will be replaced by the current Chief Accounting Officer Diana Jajeh.

CNBC quoted a source with knowledge of the situation that Recupero was pushed out by Gamestop Chairman Ryan Cohen “because he was not the right culture fit” and he was “too hands off.”

While it is unclear how many employees were laid off Thursday, Kotaku reported that the layoffs appear to have affected staffers at Gamestop’s decades-old gaming magazine Game Informer as well as the headquarters at Grapevine, Texas.

One former employee and another current Gamestop employee told Kotaku that a similar layoff event took place at the headquarters in May that affected more than 100 employees.

Some reactions to the latest round of layoffs at Gamestop have not been positive on Twitter. Former senior editor at Game Informer Imran Khan said the company “is a clown company that has no idea what it’s doing.” Speaking about the layoffs at Game Informer, one Twitter user said “GI deserve so much better than Gamestop as a parent company.”

Axios’ Stephen Totilo said the number of affected employees “doesn’t sound small.”

Late last year, reports emerged about the alleged unhealthy working environment at Gamestop. One employee said at that time that in 2020, “things started to turn into a psychologically abusive relationship between me and this company.” The company did not respond to Kotaku’s requests for a comment regarding employee complaints.