GameStop director unloads $60 million worth of stock

In a move drawing a lot of industry attention, GameStop director Leonard Riggio has sold 2.3 million shares of the company’s stock.

He earned $60.2 million from the sale and reduced his ownership in the game retail company from 6.9 percent to 5.5 percent. The timing seems odd as the sale comes right before the holiday season, when GameStop generally expects to make billions. The holiday season of 2009 is packed with potential sales blockbusters including Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and New Super Mario Bros.

Financial analyst Alex Romayev told Barron’s Magazine that the last time Riggio unloaded that much stock, he spared himself a 62 percent loss. Romayev noted that Riggio, also a founder and chairman of Barnes & Noble bookstores, didn’t divest himself of any of that company’s stock. Riggio formerly owned GameStop before it was split out as a business.

We just got an entirely different reason to await GameStop’s 2009 holiday sales numbers.

Could sluggish game sales in the early 2009 or forays into used game sales by other retailers have taken a bigger toll than anyone realized?

Read [Gamasutra] Also Read [Gamertell]