In a public announcement on Thursday, 3 February, GameStop revealed that it has entered into a partnership agreement with Immutable X to create a new NFT marketplace. A $100 million fund has been established by the two companies for this purpose.
GameStop’s NFT marketplace ready by 2022
After months of announcements, the major American video game chain has finally unveiled its new project to create its own NFT platform on the Ethereum blockchain.
Immutable X has already collaborated on NFT projects, with the famous social media TikTok in September. A post on the company’s blog states that this is the
“first layer two for NFTs on Ethereum” and Immutable X participants experience “zero gas fees, instant trades, and carbon-neutral NFTs for marketplaces, games, and applications without compromise”.
The Sydney-based company said it will be able to reduce consumption and related fees by bundling many NFT sales into a single Ethereum transaction and also buying carbon offsets.
GameStop’s new NFT marketplace, which is expected to see the light of day by the end of 2022, will create, according to the guidelines expressed in a statement by the company itself, interesting opportunities for developers to succeed in creating new zero-emission games, in which players can buy, sell and exchange game resources with the model of fungible tokens.
The operation was already reported last month to the authorities of the American stock exchange by GameStop, as announced by the Wall Street Journal. The company has also stated that it will be hiring around 20 new crypto experts within the next three months, who should be in charge of both the development of the new NFT projects and any other future projects in the cryptocurrency sphere.
GameStop’s turnaround
GameStop, headquartered in Grapevine, Texas, which has had a long slump that led the company to lose more than 60% of its value on the stock market, is now looking for a slow recovery.
The company changed its executive team and board of directors in June after a new investor, Ryan Cohen, came on board and pushed for a profound change in top management and company line. Cohen was then appointed president, and he is largely responsible for the company’s new, more technological direction.
Is the gaming world ready to embrace NFTs?
It remains to be seen if the gaming market is mature enough to welcome this new engagement revolution, thanks to non-fungible tokens. In December, Ubisoft, one of the world’s leading game developers, after launching an NFT project linked to some of its games, had declared disappointing sales and results well below expectations.
The reactions of the players to this innovative possibility seem very cold at the moment, although an Ubisoft executive declared in January to be very optimistic about the prospects of NFTs linked to videogames.
Source: https://en.cryptonomist.ch/2022/02/04/gamestop-immutable-x-marketplace-nft/