Ryan Cohen has been pushing GameStop to move away from its traditional model since joining the board shortly before a social media frenzy drove a meteoric rise in the company’s stock

Gamestop’s share price hit its highest since January today, on news that it chose shareholder Ryan Cohen as the head of a new committee to help the business pivot to e-commerce.

The Strategic Planning and Capital committee, which will comprise of board members Alan Attal and Kurt Wolf along with Cohen, looks to take the company digital at a time when sales are under pressure due to an exodus to digital downloads of console games and intensifying competition from videogame streaming services.

Chewy.com founder Cohen has been pushing GameStop to move away from its traditional model since joining the board shortly before a social media frenzy drove a meteoric rise in the company’s stock.

CMC Markets UK chief market analyst Michael Hewson said: The optimism is likely to be on the basis of how Cohen made the concept of an online pet food retail site a success, and that he can translate that success across to video games.

GameStop shares have been steadily climbing since 23 February when they were priced at $45 per share.

In January GameStop was at the centre of an amateur trading frenzy on Wall Street that led to an unprecedented short squeeze.

Reddit forum r/wallstreetbets hyped the stock, encouraging a short squeeze on hedge funds that had shorted the video game retailer. The move was a success, sending Gamestop shares to more than $400, up from around £16 at the start of the year.

Their actions saw the hedge funds scrambling for emergency bailouts, leading low-cost trading platform Robinhood to pull the plug on future trades of the stock.