Love it or hate it, GameStop is going all in on non-fungible tokens. On Thursday, the video game retailer announced it’s launching a marketplace devoted to the digital collectibles later this year.
GameStop created a website for the project at nft.gamestop.com. But for now, the site is merely calling on interested companies to submit proposals for the marketplace. To spur on interest, GameStop is creating a $100 million fund to award grants to prospective NFT developers, although the money will be offered through a virtual token.
By offering the marketplace, GameStop is betting that NFTs won’t be a fad that’ll fizzle out in a few years like Microsoft’s Kinect motion controls or collecting Beanie Babies. In addition, the marketplace could help take NFTs mainstream.
In case you don’t know, NFTs are essentially digital collectibles stored on the blockchain, which can span art, basketball cards, or other celebrity-created items you can only experience in digital form. Whether NFTs are actually worthy anything is up for debate, but some people have been paying thousands to millions of dollars in virtual currencies to own them.
Hence, selling non-fungible tokens could be big business for GameStop, especially if the retailer can bring major video game developers on board. But not everyone is a fan of NFTs. Many gamers have criticized NFT implementations as money-grabbing scams that are also bad for the environment due to the high energy usage necessary for NFT transactions. A recent survey also found that only 27% of game developers were interested in implementing NFTs.
As for GameStop, the retailer is creating the marketplace through a partnership with Immutable X, a provider of NFT trading. The $100 million grant fund will also be made of up IMX tokens.
“Our integration will allow current and future NFT projects/ economies to access more liquidity & gaming content with mainstream users,” Immutable X said in a tweet on Thursday. The technology powering the marketplace also promises to be “carbon neutral,” the company added.
