Last April, GameStop signaled its intent to get into the NFT craze by hiring analysts specialized in blockchain, cryptocurrencies, and NFTs. GameStop made no official announcements about its business plans, but it clearly had some interest in this new technology and its possible applications in gaming.
GameStop still hasn’t made any official announcements, but it did quietly launch the GameStop NFT homepage today where it listed an email address asking people to join their NFT Team.
“We are building a team,” GameStop wrote. “We welcome exceptional engineers (solidity, react, python), designers, gamers, marketers, and community leaders. If you want to join our team, send your profile or something you’ve built to: nfteam@gamestop.com.”
Besides an escalation of GameStop’s NFT hiring blitz, the site also contained an Ethereum address that led to an Ethereum contract and code for a game you can access by clicking on the upper right corner of the GameStop NFT website. It’s a runner game that puts players in control of Snazzy Bananya, the GameStop exclusive plush toy of a cat inside a banana skin, as it runs across a lunar landscape. Titled “Game On Anon,” the simple runner contains numerous references to the Wall Street Bets subreddit, like rockets, the moon, and Snazzy Bananya, which has become a popular item following the GameStop stock rally.
In fact, Game On Anon is the most GameStop has even acknowledged the Wall Street Bets drama that allowed the company to raise over half a billion dollars by selling new shares at a higher price.
It seems that GameStop might also be launching a token of its own on July 14, 2021, at 11:20 AM GMT. That’s according to dataminers on the r/GME subreddit who noted that the time corresponds with 4:20 PST, which seems like a strange time to launch GameStop’s first NFT.
NFTs, or Non-Fungible Tokens, are a controversial new technology that uses the blockchain to verify a digital file’s authenticity, essentially making it unique in a world where files can be copied with exact precision trillions of times across billions of devices.
The idea is to make digital items like music, pictures, or video as collectible as trading cards by limiting their supply. However, NFTs are often criticized for their enormous energy requirements in maintaining the blockchain, which must continually verify transactions essentially forever.
The carbon footprint of a single NFT has been compared to that of an actual, breathing human being, so a sudden boom of NFTs might have devastating consequences for global warming. A fact that companies like Sega and Ubisoft are very deliberately avoiding as they chase the next big fad.
