GameStop Builds Team on Its Ethereum-Based NFT Platform

It is no secret that the gaming world is great to play for NFTs and GameStop is not behind. GameStop, the video game retailer is welcoming engineers to create a team for its NFT platform based on Ethereum.

GameStop announced that they are working on an Ethereum based non-fungible token (NFT) platform. This is an interesting move after they caught fire this year with the Wallstreetbets crowd. The official website of GameStop advertised job vacancies for designers, engineers, gamers, and marketers to join the team.

The gaming NFTs is interesting because it gives you some sort of permanence in your gameplay.

The biggest challenge around such projects is that when one talks about creating a game, they’re talking about creating effectively a closed-loop economy. One of the things about these games is that they want you to re-buy every time you go through. You don’t necessarily need NFTs for these. NFTs are useful for projects that look at the same blockchain to look at the same tokens but treat them differently within their system.

On the one hand, it’s really forward-looking for when games are built in a fundamentally different way around these kinds of assets approach. On the other hand, it can also be capitalizing of the headline. Based on GameStop’s history of innovation it is expected that this step is being taken to capitalize on the headline.

However, this step may have been prompted by consumer demand, or the company may have other games being innovated this way.

Gaming seems to be the perfect arena for NFTs. For so long these black markets for assets within games existed. People were trading on the side while gamers and game developers pretended that nothing was happening because it wasn’t legal.

GameStop does have a meaningful brand. If someone were going to create an OpenSea type marketplace then they are not really creating the tokens themselves. It could work really well if they are merely providing a common venue for token exchange.

There is a company called Epic Games that has this game called Fortnite. There’s a company called Valve that has a platform called Steam that is effectively the dominant way to distribute and sell video games. They have had this back and forth around whether or not game ownership should be tied to platforms. Many believe that this is the perfect venue for tokenization to occur. When you buy something from one of these platforms you are not buying it so that you can use it on the Steam platform. It is just being bought regardless of where it will be used. The same analogy can transpose to music where it doesn’t matter whether it’s being purchased from iTunes or Amazon music, it’s just being bought.