Microsoft Xbox Series X Wireless Controller Electric Volt – GameStop

GameStop Corp. is an American video game, consumer electronics, and gaming merchandise retailer. The company is headquartered in Grapevine, Texas (a suburb of Dallas), and is the largest video game retailer worldwide. As of February 2024, the company operates 4,169 stores including 2,915 in the United States, 203 in Canada, 404 in Australia and 647 in Europe under the GameStop, EB Games, EB Games Australia, Micromania-Zing, ThinkGeek and Zing Pop Culture brands. The company was founded in Dallas in 1984 as Babbage's, and took on its current name in 1999.

The company's performance declined during the mid-to-late 2010s due to the shift of video game sales to online shopping and failed investments by GameStop in smartphone retail. In 2021, after retail investors on Reddit noticed that the short interest exceeded 100%, the company's stock price skyrocketed from $17.25 to over US$500 per share. According to the SEC report, this volatility was only in part due to the massive buying power of retail investors. The company received significant media attention during January and February 2021 due to the volatility of its stock price in the GameStop short squeeze; the company was ranked 577th on the Fortune 500. GameStop also used to own and publish the video game magazine Game Informer before discontinuing it in August 2024.

Microsoft Corporation is an American multinational technology conglomerate headquartered in Redmond, Washington. Founded in 1975, the company became highly influential in the rise of personal computers through software like Windows, and the company has since expanded to Internet services, cloud computing, video gaming and other fields. Microsoft is the largest software maker, one of the most valuable public U.S. companies, and one of the most valuable brands globally.

Microsoft was founded by Bill Gates and Paul Allen to develop and sell BASIC interpreters for the Altair 8800. It rose to dominate the personal computer operating system market with MS-DOS in the mid-1980s, followed by Windows. The company's 1986 initial public offering (IPO) and subsequent rise in its share price created three billionaires and an estimated 12,000 millionaires among Microsoft employees. Since the 1990s, it has increasingly diversified from the operating system market. Steve Ballmer replaced Gates as CEO in 2000 which would see the then-largest of Microsoft's corporate acquisitions in Skype Technologies in 2011, and an increased focus on hardware that led to its first in-house PC line, the Surface, in 2012, and the formation of Microsoft Mobile through Nokia. Since Satya Nadella took over as CEO in 2014, the company has changed focus towards cloud computing, as well as its large acquisition of LinkedIn for $26.2 billion in 2016. Under Nadella's direction, the company has also expanded its video gaming business to support the Xbox brand, establishing the Microsoft Gaming division in 2022, which is currently the third-largest gaming company in the world by revenue, following the 2023 acquisition of Activision Blizzard for $68.7 billion.

Microsoft has been market-dominant in the IBM PC–compatible operating system market and the office software suite market since the 1990s. Its best-known software products are the Windows line of operating systems, the Microsoft 365 suite of productivity applications, the Azure cloud computing platform, and the Edge web browser. Its flagship hardware products are the Xbox video game consoles and the Microsoft Surface lineup of touchscreen personal computers. Other consumer and enterprise software it produces include Internet search with Bing; digital services through MSN; mixed reality through HoloLens; cloud computing with Azure; and software development through Visual Studio.

Microsoft is considered one of the Big Five American information technology companies, alongside Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, and Meta. In April 2019, Microsoft reached a trillion-dollar market cap, becoming the third public U.S. company to be valued at over $1 trillion. It has been criticized for its monopolistic practices, and the company's software has been criticized for problems with ease of use, robustness, and security.

The volt (symbol: V) is the unit of electric potential, electric potential difference (voltage), and electromotive force in the International System of Units (SI).

Wireless communication (or just wireless, when the context allows) is the transfer of information (telecommunication) between two or more points without the use of an electrical conductor, optical fiber or other continuous guided medium for the transfer. The most common wireless technologies use radio waves. With radio waves, intended distances can be short, such as a few meters for Bluetooth, or as far as millions of kilometers for deep-space radio communications. It encompasses various types of fixed, mobile, and portable applications, including two-way radios, cellular telephones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and wireless networking. Other examples of applications of radio wireless technology include GPS units, garage door openers, wireless computer mouse, keyboards and headsets, headphones, radio receivers, satellite television, broadcast television and cordless telephones. Somewhat less common methods of achieving wireless communications involve other electromagnetic phenomena, such as light and magnetic or electric fields, or the use of sound.

The term wireless has been used twice in communications history, with slightly different meanings. It was initially used from about 1890 for the first radio transmitting and receiving technology, as in wireless telegraphy, until the new word radio replaced it around 1920. Radio sets in the UK and the English-speaking world that were not portable continued to be referred to as wireless sets into the 1960s. The term wireless was revived in the 1980s and 1990s mainly to distinguish digital devices that communicate without wires, such as the examples listed in the previous paragraph, from those that require wires or cables. This became its primary usage in the 2000s, due to the advent of technologies such as mobile broadband, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth.

Wireless operations permit services, such as mobile and interplanetary communications, that are impossible or impractical to implement with the use of wires. The term is commonly used in the telecommunications industry to refer to telecommunications systems (e.g. radio transmitters and receivers, remote controls, etc.) that use some form of energy (e.g. radio waves and acoustic energy) to transfer information without the use of wires. Information is transferred in this manner over both short and long distances.

X, or x, is the twenty-fourth letter of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ex (pronounced ), plural exes.

Xbox is a video gaming brand that consists of five home video game consoles, as well as applications (games), streaming service Xbox Cloud Gaming, and online services such as the Xbox network and Xbox Game Pass. The brand is produced by Microsoft Gaming, a division of Microsoft.

The brand was first introduced in the United States in November 2001, with the launch of the original Xbox console. The Xbox branding was formerly, from 2012 to 2015, used as Microsoft's digital media entertainment brand replacing Zune. In 2022, Microsoft expanded its gaming business and reorganized Xbox to become part of its newly formed Microsoft Gaming division. Under Microsoft Gaming, Xbox's first-party publishers are Xbox Game Studios, ZeniMax Media (Bethesda Softworks), and Activision Blizzard (Activision, Blizzard Entertainment, and King), who own numerous studios and successful franchises.

The original device was the first video game console offered by an American company after the Atari Jaguar stopped sales in 1996. It reached over 24 million units sold by May 2006. Microsoft's second console, the Xbox 360, was released in 2005 and has sold 86 million units as of October 2021. The third console, the Xbox One, was released in November 2013 and has sold 58 million units. The fourth line of Xbox consoles, the Xbox Series X and Series S, were released in November 2020. The head of Xbox is Phil Spencer, who succeeded former head Marc Whitten in late March 2014.