Currently a gamer can walk into any GameStop video-game store and buy a card good for points on the Xbox Live Marketplace–a virtual store where people can download games and content–some for free, others traded for points. GameStop wants to streamline the whole process, so that when people buy points cards, they will automatically have them downloaded onto their machines at home. The only problem is they’d have to let GameStop into their accounts 24/7, and who knows what else they’d get up to in there.Ars Technica has the story.The move has some privacy implications, but more than that, it’s a somewhat desperate attempt by GameStop to remain anything close to a viable business in today’s download-based market.Since people don’t have to leave their homes anymore and go to a physical store to buy games, points cards, or what have you, why would they want to go GameStop at all? Apparently because GameStop’s points cards have some bonus features that you can’t download. Still, buying a physical card, taking it home, and plugging it into your hardware seems so 2008.Shawn Freeman, an exec at GameStop, tells Ars Technica:”Ultimately, we want to reduce even more of that friction, so when you buy that map pack in our store, we’re going to be able to associate your Xbox profile with your GameStop profile, and then automatically push that to your download queue.” Surely the move would help the company remain competitive. But whether people want a video-game store to have access to every game they play, when they play them, and what they say when they chat online about them remains in question.