GameStop’s NFT marketplace was selling games without the developer’s permission

An NFT user using the GameStop marketplace has admitted to making developers’ games without their consent or knowledge. The games, which are freely available on itch.io, were sold hundreds of times before GameStop removed them, and continue to exist on GameStop’s servers regardless of the original creators’ wishes.

As reported by Ars Technica, the NiFTy Arcade was slightly different from most of the NFTs on GameStop’s marketplace, selling the ability to access certain games from one’s wallet, rather than (receipts for) JPEGs. However, these games were not created by the person who coined them, and the actual creators had not given permission for them to be used in this way.

The games, made in the (excellent, undeserving of this mess) Pico-8 engine, include Worm Nom Nom and Galactic Wars, both of which were and remain freely playable on the developer’s itch.io sites.

The person who minted them as NFTs, Nathan Ello, sold them for 0.019 ETH (about $23/£19) and 0.052 ETH (about $63/£52) respectively. The benefit of making this purchase over playing them for free, according to Ello via Ars, was “the convenience of playing the game directly from their wallet or their own Marketplace profile page without having to navigate to mine.” This was apparently reason enough for hundreds of purchases, netting Ello a reported 8.4 ETH (about $14,878/£12,270) in primary sales and 4.67 ETH (about $8,271/£6,822) in secondary sales. GameStop would also have received marketplace and commission fees on these transactions.

Ello admitted to Ars that he tampered with the games without the developers’ permission. At least one of the games, Worm Nom Nom, was listed under a Creative Commons license that prohibits commercial use.

The games were removed from GameStop’s NFT marketplace, but Ello reportedly kept the cryptocurrency he received from selling them, and both Nifty and Ello still have active accounts on the marketplace.

The NFTs that were sold may also continue to circulate in other marketplaces in addition to being available on GameStop’s servers via cached copies and their owners’ crypto wallets, regardless of the wishes of the original developers. Pico-8’s creator Joseph White has issued a DMCA takedown request to GameStop, but even if the directly hosted copy is deleted from their servers, it may still be available thanks to their use of the Interplanetary File System standard, which hosts copies of uploaded files across multiple server nodes. GameStop’s own FAQ states that if an NFT is suspended for, say, DMCA reasons or a Terms of Service violation, “you still have full ownership of it and it’s still available to you.”

This isn’t the first time GameStop has removed an NFT from their marketplace, which launched just a couple of months ago. Recently, they removed an image based on a 9/11 victim, as reported by PC Gamer. It is also not the first time that a Web 3 project has used games without the developers’ permission. Back in June, a website called w3itch.io took source code and games hosted on the real, anti-NFT itch.io without the consent of itch or the games’ creators.

I could go on, but Web3 is doing well, already reporting on everything happening in the room, all with useful tags like “art theft”, “environment” and “yikes”.