What happened
Shares of GameStop (GME -3.94%) are up 6% this week compared to where they closed last Friday, according to data from S&P Global Market Intelligence, after the company launched its new non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace on Monday.
While initial reports indicated the platform was off to a slow start, CNET subsequently reported over $3.5 million had been spent on the marketplace's top 50 collections as of Wednesday, which helped lift the video game retailer's shares.
Although GameStop shares had reached as high as $151 a share, or 18% above last Friday's close, they gave back all those gains and then some and finished trading on Thursday at around $136 per share, a 3.6% loss for the day and down over 10% from their peak.
Image source: Getty Images.
So what
GameStop NFT is the video game retailer's NFT marketplace, and as of Friday morning its top 50 collections have attracted over $4.63 million in transactions, up $1.1 million or so in the past two days.
While it's remarkable that people are still spending that kind of money in the midst of a cryptocurrency and NFT pricing collapse -- Bitcoin is trading under $21,000 this morning, down 56% in 2022, and Cointelegraph reports June NFT volumes hit their lowest level of the year in June -- GameStop isn't pulling in all that much money from its venture.
With a royalty rate of 2.25%, the video game retailer has generated about $104,000 so far this week.
Yet it is more than many had suspected it would make considering market conditions and the fact that GameStop's NFT marketplace is currently limited to selling artwork. The biggest-selling collection so far is MetaBoy, which has taken in $1.1 million in sales so far this week. Its artwork is actually heavily pixelated Game Boy–themed GIFs. They can range in price from just a few dollars to almost $1 million if you choose to plunk down that kind of money.
The collections are priced in Ether (the currency of the Ethereum blockchain -- that near-million-dollar GIF will set you back 741 Ether), which has lost about 70% of its value this year.
Now what
The NFT exchange isn't GameStop's only channel for attempting to transform its business according to where the gaming industry is headed, though it's the most visible at the moment.
GameStop's stock has lost 8% of its value in 2022 so far and is down nearly 19% over the past year, though it's still well above the lows it was trading at when the meme stock trading frenzy took off last year.
GameStop will be effecting a 4-for-1 stock split on Monday.
