GameStop's Deal With Microsoft Gives It a Cut of Every Digital Game Sale

The deal GameStop (NYSE: GME) negotiated with Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) last week is apparently better than many people thought. While shares of the video game retailer got a big boost from the original announcement, which focused heavily on GameStop using the software giant's back-end solutions to better meet customer needs in the digital gaming era, largely unnoticed was a sentence saying both companies will "benefit from the customer acquisition and lifetime revenue value of each gamer brought into the Xbox ecosystem." According to website Ars Technica, the private equity firm spoke with GameStop directly, which confirmed the retailer "will receive a portion of the downstream revenue from any device we will bring into the Xbox ecosystem."