Kongregate was supposed to be GameStop's play for mobile, delivering free-to-play games with a little help from Adobe Flash. It worked well enough to start: the Kongregate Arcade app has over 500,000 downloads on Android and a 4.5-star rating. Now that Adobe has abandoned Flash for mobile, though, the future of Kongregate Arcade doesn’t seem so bright: Bartel calls the app a "brand-building exercise," rather than a commercial product. "Flash not being a part of mobile going forward will have an impact," Bartel admits.

GameStop’s publicly reported that Kongregate's overall business doubled last year, and increased another 50 percent in the first quarter. Bartel's still interested in the potential of Kongregate games on mobile, but he's not quite sure that the web and HTML5 are mature enough platforms yet. "Needless to say, Kongregate is going to change. As the platform continues to evolve, Kongregate will evolve to let those games take place."

GameStop recently bought Spawn Labs as well, which is still working on a streaming game platform to rival OnLive and Sony’s recently-acquired Gaikai. At first, Bartel doesn't seem too keen on discussing the platform. "The technology works great," he tells me. When I bring up Sony's recent aquisition, his eyes light up a bit. "We're feeling very good about our investment, that's what I'll say."

When I ask when the service will launch, though, Bartel begins to hedge, hinting that Spawn’s time hasn’t come yet. He tells me about how the service would require a huge investment to start, and how there isn’t necessarily a commercial opportunity worth pursuing at this point.

Then, the truth comes out. GameStop isn't sure how to scale the service, because the basic idea hasn't really evolved since day one: Bartel tells me that the Spawn Labs service still requires that the company hook up a real physical game console for each and every remote player. It’s a plan that has some major pros and cons. On the plus side, it's completely platform-agnostic, so GameStop could use the system with any console or game, right out of the box. The minuses are tremendous, though: Spawn would have to physically change out discs for each new wave of games, and lose a lot of the latency advantages OnLive and Gaikai have by virtualizing and overclocking PC games inside of dedicated servers.

Moreover, GameStop could face legal challenges. Late last year, a US district court issued a permanent injunction against a startup named Zediva, which had a bright idea at the time: it would offer a streaming movie service to its customers by buying physical DVDs and playing them from real optical drives. GameStop is no startup, but the parallel is hard to deny. Still, Bartel believes that the relationships between GameStop and the publishers are are strong enough to pull it off, despite conflicts of interest like the one Sony’s upcoming Gaikai streaming service might pose. "We're the largest retailer they have in terms of video game space," he says, suggesting that Sony wouldn’t sue. "Everyone wants to have their games distributed and discovered." Bartel says a private beta with six data centers was incredibly successful, and that as soon as they figure out the strategy, they'll be ready for a nationwide rollout. "Like everything we do, it's going to be big," says Bartel.

GameStop has other upcoming experiments, which may or may not "be big." Later this year, Bartel tells me, GameStop will launch a cross-platform app for Android and iOS that helps you find quality games — not unlike Nvidia's Tegra Zone or Qualcomm's GameCommand. Notably, it isn’t a store: Bartel says that you'll still buy your games through Google Play and the iTunes App Store, but the app will have some kind of connection to GameStop's physical retail locations and use the company's PowerUp Rewards points as well. It’s hard to say how GameStop will get a piece of the action on mobile platforms if it’s not actually selling the games, though.