2022 is likely to be all about NFT and cryptocurrency: they’ve had a solid start to the year…

Seriously, it’s been a week, and we’ve already written about Square Enix’ and Konami’s NFT plans, and yesterday, Norton Crypto was in the news, and where is the end of 2022…? You can now add another company to the list of interested parties: GameStop, a game retailer. The Wall Street Journal reports that the company has set up a team that will deal with a cryptocurrency and NFTs in video games.

According to the site’s sources, the company has already hired more than 20 people for this team, and the online platform they are supposed to create will launch by the end of the year. GameStop is also in talks with several publishers and developers to sell NFTs. These could be weapons, costumes or other digital items, and cryptocurrencies. There is already a website where you can apply to become an NFT creator…

Is it any surprise that GameStop has not yet responded to the Wall Street Journal’s article? No. But Reuters pointed out that the company’s share value has risen by about 27% since the article was published, so we have the same “benefitting the investors” thought as we saw in the New Year letter from Square Enix’s CEO (we wrote there that we thought he was trying to please investors…). The company has started to shift its strategy to e-commerce, as there could be obstacles in the retail sector (it is understandable in the context of a particular pandemic; the proportion of PlayStation Store sales, i.e. digital game sales, has also seen a significant increase over at Sony).

Matt Furlong, a former Amazon executive, took over as CEO in June, and with him came several other people from Jeff Bezos’ company. A year ago, GameStop became a meme on the stock market. It’s in a financial rut. It won’t be easy to get back on a successful track from here.

Source: Gamesindustry