Dive Brief:

• GameStop’s mobile home page is designed to the max, with 77 page elements — taking a massive 846 kilobytes, according to mobile and internet performance analysis firm Keynote. 

• Ideally, retailers should aim for 10 or so elements with page weights of 100 kilobytes or less, the firm says.

• All that heavy fun means GameStop’s mobile page takes more than 13 seconds to load — a relative eternity that Keynote described as “poor performance.” Loading time for retailers’ mobile pages should take no more than eight seconds, the firm said.

Dive Insight:

Apparently, GameStop thinks gamers have all day. (Well, OK, some gamers actually do.) But 13 seconds to load a mobile page is a discouraging amount of time even for people with nothing better to do. GameStop has an incentive to get gamers physically into its stores, for its small-but-fairly-lucrative trade-and-sell business, and its policies certainly discourage digital shopping. So maybe the horrendous loading times are a genius move, after all.