This guest post is written by Jason Collins.
In today’s digital world, a modern company’s real nightmare isn’t bankruptcy, but irrelevance. Becoming irrelevant in our attention economy-driven landscape means that once loyal customers stop caring, the internet stops talking, and the company’s once-massive brand turns into a nostalgic punchline. This is particularly true for companies that operate, or are adjacent to, the entertainment industry.
GameStop was a prime candidate for that fate, considering that the company was built for a world of physical media (like cartridges and discs), in-mall foot traffic, and midnight launches that felt like actual cultural events. The company certainly wasn’t prepared for the digital revolution in which digital purchases and downloads replaced cases, subscriptions replaced collections, and the very idea of going to a physical store to buy a physical copy of a game started to feel like a relic.
Despite all of that, GameStop has repeatedly managed to stay strangely present in the modern world of digital downloads and short attention spans. Admittedly, not always for the reasons it would’ve chosen, or even thanks to its marketing team, but present nonetheless. The January 2021 short squeeze is definitely one of those reasons, when a bunch of financially literate Reddit users started buying GameStop stock, which led to the shutdown of at least one hedge fund, and a number of investigations and lawsuits.
And now, GameStop has done it again; the company managed to turn a disaster into an opportunity to reach the headlines and stay relevant for a while longer. Enter Staplegate: an internet-born scandal that sounds like an absolute joke until you realize that it’s a perfect snapshot of how product launches, social media, and corporate crisis management work nowadays. Namely, during the midnight launch of the Nintendo Switch 2, the much-anticipated successor to the original Switch, a handful of customers walked out of the store with brand-new consoles bearing tiny holes and screen damage.
The story about damaged consoles right out of the box detonated online almost instantly, partially because the story surrounding the cause of the damage was so mundane. Nothing about the incident involved any type of hacking, fraud, or complex scheme to part unsuspecting customers from their hard-earned cash. The main culprit was actually a basic retail habit of stapling the receipt to the box so the customer doesn’t lose it, combined with a midnight-launch rush, and the console’s packaging that didn’t offer much protection.
It’s a common practice for retail workers to staple the receipt to the box or packaging of a purchased item, and GameStop has reportedly been doing this for years. For the workers of the GameStop location in Staten Island, New York, this was just another busy night. None of them even suspected that the packaging design of the Nintendo Switch 2 left the console’s screen so close to the box surface that a staple could puncture both the box and the console’s screen.
Naturally, many customers weren’t satisfied with receiving damaged consoles, but GameStop’s timely and adequate response turned the situation around, which is really important because the internet rarely forgives a company that treats its customer complaints like background noise. The reporting around the incident allowed GameStop’s management to isolate the issue to a single store and resolve it as quickly as possible.
In this case, affected customers were offered replacement units or were otherwise compensated, and the management moved quickly to prevent this from happening in the most memorable way possible: By removing all the staplers from the store in question. Not only is this move practical, but it’s also a bit comedic, which definitely earned GameStop a few favor points with the perpetually online netizens.
However, the company took a step further by transforming Staplegate from a viral moment that would surely become an internet meme and turned it into a charity auction. In July 2025, GameStop listed a bundle tied to the incident on eBay. The bundle contained the stapler itself, the “first-stapled” Nintendo Switch 2, which had been repaired and refurbished prior to the auction, the marked box, and the “carefully extracted and preserved” staple that did the damage.
The gaming-enthusiastic netizens love artifacts that prove that the story behind the meme is real, and GameStop essentially treated the stapler like a piece of pop-culture memorabilia. The auction was framed as a fundraiser for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals, effectively re-framing the narrative from a corporate blunder to corporate accountability, the latter of which is much-needed nowadays, even if it comes with a twist such as a fundraiser for a noble cause.
GameStop CEO Ryan Cohen said in a post on Twitter that he’d even include his underwear in the auction if bids surpass six figures. It’s currently unknown whether that was a joke or a master move, considering how gamers love challenges and achievements. Online coverage of the bid tracked the numbers climbing into absurd territory, with the final sale landing at $250,000 after hundreds of bids. The Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals later confirmed that the auction did, indeed, raise $250,000 for its member hospitals.
In the end, Staplegate is a memorable moment in the mid-2020s gaming scene, but not because someone tried to sabotage the launch or some evil corporate conspiracy. It’s memorable because a staple went in where it shouldn’t have, and because GameStop finally spoke the language of its customers and other gamers, turning chaos into a widely reported charitable win.
Image Credit: Michael Fortsch
Video Game Town 
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